Trendy Wendy Phones
August 17th, 2010 | 
Author: 
Gilbert Adair wrote an article in yesterday’s Independent about him ‘falling out of love with Apple Mac’. I fell about laughing, it provoked a massive response which considering all the really important things in this world was as pathetic as it was funny but to me, not at all surprising, people do love their Totem Poles I guess.
I have written before that the saddest thing about our consumer society is that in retail terms, the iPhone is the most ‘radical product’ to have been produced in the past 10 years – how totally depressing !
My Comments
Oh rash author ! You have dared to criticise the “Tabernacle of The Mac” you foolish person. If you had been really brave, you could have slipped in a few negatives on Linux and got “Penguin’d” at the same time.
I have some sympathy with you on much of what you have written, I was actually given an iPhone as a present by a well meaning friend. I thought the interface was wonderful, very original and effective but in reality it is just an iPod with a rather indifferent phone bolted on so, I gave it to one of my Sons who made good use of it. During his degree show when he had to do the invigilating shift, he loaded all three of the Lord of the Rings on it to keep himself entertained !
With a background in IT as a Project Manager, all smart phones remind me of the “must have Palm Pilots” of a decade ago, pointless Boy’s Toys as in AngeloZ’s assertion of an iPhone Laundry App – hilarious if true and likely it is. To me the whole “smart phone” thing is a total crock, a commercial device like Father’s Day for people to buy pretty shabby products built by Chinese slave labour because the manufacturers need to keep the whole marketing thing going round and round and always have a fresh product for the Lemming consumers to buy.
Really Clever Marketing
The cleverest thing about the iProducts is purely commercial, it is the iStore, I have never seen anything so clever since ink jet cartridges, give the product away and make money out of the ‘consumables’, an excellent scam ! Anybody want to buy London Bridge ? I have an inside deal called iBridge, going pretty cheap, 10% down secures an option, phone me on your iPhone !
All joking apart, I really did admire the touch screen interface on the iPhone, it is excellent but for me it is similar to something else: I am a keen photographer, heavily into computer graphics and as such, totally admire the graphics in computer games, some of the programming is stunning but I don’t play computer games, they are just not for me just as I use a mobile phone for making and getting calls, smart phones, not just the iPhone are not for me either, I really don’t have the time to deal with them or rearrange my life around them.
An Excellent Interface
The iPhone interface is by far the best I’ve seen but even that can be screwed up. A friend of mine was showing me all the apps he had loaded on his iPhone and it was obvious that he was totally lost in trying to find the particular app he wanted to show me. It rather reminded me of people running Windows PCs that cover their desktop with short cuts to applications that they will rarely if ever, use and as a consequence, can never find the one they want.
My Canon DSLRs take great pictures but they are rubbish on making phone calls ! The reality is that I’m not interested in a phone that takes pictures, does movies or anything else apart from send and receive phone calls. If I want to take pictures, I will use a proper camera not some half arsed phone.
It was my son Michael who I had given the iPhone to who made the point that as a phone, it was a bit pants and was always a ‘mobile phone freak’. I have a number of friends who have iPhones and under many conditions, hearing what they are saying, can be painful, one in particular has his car rigged with music via the iPhone and hands free but 50% of the time, it sounds like you’re speaking to someone underwater, I always ask him to call me back when he gets to his destination.
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