iPhone Op-ed [Technology]

So, my friend asked my opinion on my beloved iPhone.

Actually, he asked:

So .. tell me .. do you just LOVE your iPhone? I was bugging Ty about phones, I've been bugging Collin about phones, I've bugged my sister and my mom, and now I'm bugging you.

I want that google phone that Collin has but I'm not totally sure it's the best choice.

I SHOULD go with the free version called My Parents Family Plan, but ... well, basically I'm crazy and I really want a fancy phone.

Anyhow, on a scale of 1 - 10 (1 being you think of your phone the way I think of this nearly worthless Verizon Razor), how do you feel about your iPhone?

And so I wrote him an iPhone novel:

I do just LOVE my iPhone. I love being on the Internet no matter where I am -- airports, especially. I love the app that identifies any song. I love being able to google or wiki anything at any time. Voice-activated searches that work a lot better with Southern accents than the ones in that computer class I had in college. I can control the iTunes on the upstairs computer from downstairs on my couch. AP news, New York Times, Twittering, Facebooking, all easily accessible. I can take/send (semi) quality photos, order Netflix, Fandango tickets, look up recipes, find restaurants, GPS my way somewhere (out of Chicago in a rental car with broken GPS plugs, in fact), find out the weather, play games when I'm bored (from crosswords to solitaire to bowling to not-quite-tetris) and most importantly check my e-mail at any time. Plus, it's like you're in this exclusive club of awesome people who use Apple everything and scoff at anything Microsoft/Nokia/etc.



However, there are definitely some cons to the iPhone:
The bill -- it is expensive. Like $96/month. I have the cheapest calling plan and the medium data plan -- the latter frustrates me like nothing else. It goes from the 200 text messages/month plan for $4.99 to 1500 msgs/month for $14.99. I call B.S. on AT&T, because seriously, I just want somewhere in between (I use about 400). Ridiculous. And you can't even forward texts -- only e-mails. (Data, by the way, the Internet and all your apps and such, is unlimited.) ALSO, you can't send or receive picture messages. When you get one, it gives you this Web site to go to with an impossible-to-remember code and password to type in to see the photo. So that's annoying unless you happen to either have pen & paper or are by a different computer. And you just straight-up can't send picture messages -- but you can e-mail them with super easy convenience, so that's usually what I do. There are supposedly apps you can buy to do that, but I haven't tried yet (well, when I tried I was at work and it wasn't working on 3G).



You have this 3G network, which is what enables you to have Internet (and service) at any time. When you're at home you can connect to your own wireless, which is much faster, especially for downloading new apps and podcasts and all that jazz. But when you are out, say, at your parents house in the middle of rural Tennessee, then you get no service for calls, SMS, internet, nothing. No news. Few apps work. Your GPS doesn't work. Etc. This, of course, is the time when you really need it, whenever you are lost in the middle of nowhere with not even a gas station in sight. Not to mention the practically nonexistent battery life -- I now carry my USB cable in my purse.

So, is it worth it? Totally. Are there other phones that do a lot of the same things that don't cost as much? Absolutely. Talk to people with the Sprint Instinct, the Verizon Dare or Blackberry, and all the other phones I know nothing about.

I guess if I have to give it a scale of 1-10, I'd go with an 8. Maybe 8.5.

Compared to all other phones I've ever had? 100.