its name is "Brigadier Bobblesby"
I finally gave in and got myself an iPhone. Since my old palm phone was stolen at the gym, I'd been using my blackberry pearl, which kept me constantly full to the brim with bile and disdain. (there's a broken parallelism there. I wonder which bodily humor is the appropriate metaphor for disdain.) It was slow and clumsy in all the wrong ways, and its predictive text was constantly frustrating, because one typo would turn the entire word into gibberish. I might have gone backwards, but they don't make anything as simple and elegant as the Treo 600 anymore. And if I was going to go forward, I wasn't taking half-measures and getting a device with some in-house OS device with no third party software and its own infuriating quirks, nor a Windows Mobile phone that combined all the slowness of a bloated desktop OS with the clumsiness of a tiny stylus-driven interface. No, only Apple would do. Apple's user interfaces are among the least customizable, which is usually bad, but they make up for it by doing it right the first time. Note the word "interfaces." The iPhone interface has an unmistakable Apple aesthetic, but it's not a direct port of the OS X look and feel. They were willing to relax their branding enough to start from scratch and think about how a mobile phone OS _should_ look.
I still vacillated on the purchase for months, because I hated the idea of paying an extra $360 a year for the data plan. I mostly want a smartphone I can use to keep my schedule and jot down notes. But under strong urging from euziere (who knows how badly I need an organizer, and how poorly other phones have worked for me), and with the considered advice of Mike (who owns an iphone) and Steve and Greg (who were more excited about Android, but agreed that the iphone was the right thing for my needs), I decided to go for it. I find it ironic that I often evangelize Macs to other people* (who never listen), but other people had to push for so long to get me to try an iphone.
* In case you're wondering, my Mac evangelism consists of the following two points: 1) Apple is almost fanatically generous with their protection plan. If you buy the three year warranty, you are going to have a functioning computer for three years (unless you drop it -- and I mean, like, drop it into an alligator). 2) OS X is built on BSD, so if their graphical interface ever fails to satisfy, you can do almost anything through the terminal. There is usually a third point that is context dependent.
Anyway, I'm quite pleased so far. It has the expected annoyances and artificial limitations, but it also Just Works, and it makes it easy for me to do the things I want to do with it. Also, at long last, I have a phone that actually syncs with my computer, for real! My only real complaint was the lack of a clipboard, and the first time I plugged it into my computer, it offered to download a system update that adds one!
I still vacillated on the purchase for months, because I hated the idea of paying an extra $360 a year for the data plan. I mostly want a smartphone I can use to keep my schedule and jot down notes. But under strong urging from euziere (who knows how badly I need an organizer, and how poorly other phones have worked for me), and with the considered advice of Mike (who owns an iphone) and Steve and Greg (who were more excited about Android, but agreed that the iphone was the right thing for my needs), I decided to go for it. I find it ironic that I often evangelize Macs to other people* (who never listen), but other people had to push for so long to get me to try an iphone.
* In case you're wondering, my Mac evangelism consists of the following two points: 1) Apple is almost fanatically generous with their protection plan. If you buy the three year warranty, you are going to have a functioning computer for three years (unless you drop it -- and I mean, like, drop it into an alligator). 2) OS X is built on BSD, so if their graphical interface ever fails to satisfy, you can do almost anything through the terminal. There is usually a third point that is context dependent.
Anyway, I'm quite pleased so far. It has the expected annoyances and artificial limitations, but it also Just Works, and it makes it easy for me to do the things I want to do with it. Also, at long last, I have a phone that actually syncs with my computer, for real! My only real complaint was the lack of a clipboard, and the first time I plugged it into my computer, it offered to download a system update that adds one!