Somehow I never bought an Apple product until 6 weeks ago. Until that moment, I used to complain about Micro products all the time. I had heard nothing but great stories about MacBooks, iPods, G5’s and so on, but somehow… I just stuck to Bill Gates & friends. But then I decided I really wanted a smart phone. I was fed up with carrying my laptop with me all over the place just to be able to check my e-mail.
Enter Twitter, where I asked other people what I should buy: a Nokia N96? A blackberry? The HTC Pro? Or perhaps an iPhone? I was overwhelmed with responses. About 90% of the people suggested I’d buy an iPhone. They all noted how amazingly brilliant and spectacular the iPhone was. So I bought one.
Enter problems, such as the incredibly annoying and frustrating iTunes syncing &^#$(@*#&^&% (something as earthyl as a word does not suffice here), that eventually led to the permanent disappearance of 500 of my contacts. I was also kind of well… flabbergasted that the battery of the iPhone didn’t even last a day when I used it to watch The Daily Show or The West Wing on it. ‘You can just by this Apple gadget, this extra battery thingy, for only 55 dollars,’ a friend suggested. Yeah, right. I just want a battery that lasts at least a day. I was also puzzled by the fact that the most basic of functions in text messaging was missing: when you write a text message, the iPhone doesn’t tell you how many characters you have left. And of course there are other problems: applications that get stuck or crash, frozen screens that can only be taken care of by rebooting. Then there is the necessity of buying a protecting cover, because without it your iPhone would break in half immediately when you accidentally drop it. Of course there are also synchronization bugs that cause programs you deleted before to reappear… the list seems endless. Oh, and of course you can not run two applications at the same time. So if you are on MSN (through the Nimbuzz application for example) and you want to check your e-mail, you’re automatically logged out.
But none of that compares to my frustration about how the iPhone is destroying my online social life through that ancient old medium we usually call ‘e-mail’. Forget about twittering, msn, facebook, hyves, linkedin and all that other stuff… The iPhone is killing e-mail. And that is all thanks to the illustrous and mindbogglingly small keyboard… It has caused me to almost throw my iPhone against a wall, because typing is so painstakingly slow because of all the mistakes you make in typing (letters… too… small… and… too… close… together…!). But not only me apparently, since some of my friends have started sending me shorter and shorter e-mails. In the past (recent past: months, sometimes weeks ago) I used to have interesting discussions and fun conversations with some of my friends through e-mail, nowadays responses to my sometimes lenghty mails can be things like: ‘that’s nice’, ‘ok’ or ‘good idea’. The iPhone is not suited for typing. Or should I say: The ijonr is not syited for typibg.
Don’t get me wrong: I like Twitter, where I only have 140 characters to tell my friends and other people what’s on my mind. But dammit… I want my online social life back! The iPhone is killing communication as we know it. It… it’s the end of the world as we know it. And as opposed to R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, I do NOT feel fine about it!
(By the way, I’m typing this on my laptop. That I still (have to) carry around because of the keyboard issue…)