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iPhone, therefore I am
July 8, 2008
Friday morning I will be in line at the local AT&T store to buy a
new 3G iPhone. I waited for a full year for Apple to add GPS and 3G, and now that they have done that, I have no excuse to postpone it any longer. (And, my Verizon contract expires tomorrow morning.)
The new iPhone is a tantalizing mix of Internet appliance, telephone, and iPod. I want one, and this blog helps me justify the purchase.
With my new iPhone I will:
1. be able to show photos of my recent projects and adventures (Iguazú Falls is on the top of the list)
2. be able to review projects in PDF format, upload comments and corrections, while not in my office
3. demonstrate digital photographic techniques to a person at a lunch counter, if ever I were to be sitting at a lunch counter
4. send and receive e-mail away from my desk
5. make telephone calls
I think the iPhone is the most elegant portable computing device ever invented. It’s pretty, it has a gorgeous display, and it’s a good phone too. I’ll have to switch from Verizon (I’ve been a customer since the flip-phone), something I am not excited about, but I am going where the action is, and AT&T has an exclusive on that action with Apple.
The changes made by Apple on the new 3G iPhone are good, but it is the addition of the
Mobile Me service that makes it really attractive. When I am at the University, I don’t check my e-mail because it is too distracting; when I travel, I use a web mail application to read and respond to e-mails. All of the e-mail activity is on the home office machine. I don’t have a cell phone that can receive e-mail, so until now that hasn’t been an option. But my new iPhone will allow me to receive and send e-mail from almost anywhere. The Mobile Me service will synchronize my e-mail so that I can read it wherever I am, and update it wherever I am not. That same service will also update and synchronize my Address Book and Calendar applications everywhere so that I can make a change on any of my computers, and it will be reflected on all of them. I really like that.
The LCD screen on the iPhone can display images and movies with tremendous quality, good enough in my brief experience with an iPhone, to evaluate color on screen with some expectation that it will be close to the real thing. According to one color expert, Apple encodes images sent to iPods and iPhones with a special color profile appropriate to the display. For a person who has spent the last fifteen years working on color management systems, this is a pretty powerful feature.
If it sounds like this blog is a form of justification for a new gadget, it is. But! I’ll share, I promise!
Posted by Brian Lawler on July 8, 2008 | Comments (0)
