The iPhone

Posted by Fleeceman on March 16th, 2009 filed in Entertainment, Movies, Technology, Writing

 

I needed an iPhone about as much as I needed an elephant in my back yard, but since Amazon was fresh out of elephants, I opted for the simpler purchase of the phone.

Suffice to say, it’s pimp. As one fellow user said, it’s a far better computer than it is a phone, but otherwise it’s flawless. The camera during the day for portraits is almost stunning, but in low light it’s like smattering corn meal over frog’s eyes in a mud puddle at midnight. Non-lovers of the phone poo-poo the idea of the buttonless keyboard, but I’ve used the Crackberry alternative, and was duly unimpressed with those tiny little carpel tunnel buttons.

The Apps, which is part and parcel of Apple’s amazing ability to turn the common into something bordering on the second coming of Louis the XIV, are simultaneously super cool and slightly glitchy. Being a wordsmith, I felt obligated to find a dictionary app, and while the free ones were somewhat decent, they were limited, and the user comments basically put them on the back burner. One user freaked me out: she’d tried every dictionary app, in effect buying all the apps, which range from .99¢ to $9.99 and some were $25, which means she probably spent close to $200 to find the “right one,” but none of them truly tickled her word fancy. (She did eventually find one, but damn, by that time you might as well just go back to the dictionary.) The simple fix? Go to Merriam Webster online and add to homepage: it’ll give you a cool little button and automatically be a mobile-based wordfinder.

It also plays movies like Batman and RocknRolla, which I backed up and fed through iTunes. That part is utterly fantastic, as far as I’m concerned. People with video iPods have already been there, and most people who haven’t tried it give a haughty sniff to the wind at the concept of watching a movie on a screen the size of a credit card. But then you try it.

This is all old news of course. A “review” of a phone that’s been out for days? Who cares? Well, I haven’t written anything since the Tea Fire in Montecito burned down my entire neighborhood, so I figured this was a good place to start.

Now I’ve got to work on getting a new backyard so I can get that elephant.