My head tells me to hang up on my new iPhone. But my heart just wants to give it a ring
PERHAPS YOU THOUGHT you and your iPhone were just a summer fling. If only that was so! It began as a purchase driven more by emotion than logic. Everyone knows you look hot pulling up at the club hand-in-hand with an iPhone. And your first public displays of affection were done to make a bit of a scene: all that multi-touching, the way you pressed your cheek against it, the way you gyrated your Super Monkey Balls. The people around you gave that look that said: “Get a room, already!” Pure jealousy! But posturing was soon replaced by something more. You really started to like this phone.
Your First Fight
Of course, the road of love is not without bumps. For many first-timers, the iPhone was surprisingly high maintenance, an unexpected handful.
So many complaints: the touch screen makes texting slow and awkward; the battery life is short; dropped calls, especially while traveling at speed in a vehicle, are common. Stereo Bluetooth is nowhere to be found. The camera is crappy, with no video recording capability. There’s no Flash player. There’s no MMS service. Frequent software crashes are becoming an issue. And data rates aren’t always as fast as they should be.
Bleeding-edge geeks feel that Apple hasn’t lived up to its “Half the price, twice the speed” promise. A class action lawsuit launched in the US in August against Apple alleges that the new iPhone’s 3G performance and reliability has been subpar, contrary to claims made by Apple’s aggressive marketing campaign.
It’s awful when a love affair leads to a court battle. Sometimes it’s best to just take a break from each other.
Wandering Fingers
There are plenty more fish in the sea: LG’s Dare, HTC’s Diamond, Samsung’s Omnia, Garmin’s nüvifone. They all look like the iPhone. They all have touch screens (although not multi-touch). They all sing and dance.
In fact, many of them beat the iPhone in specs. They have better battery life, easier input methods and removable memory cards. They support stereo Bluetooth. They shoot video. Calls stay connected. Some even have a flash on the camera.
Despite all this, from the first time you hold your iPhone, you know in your heart that you were made for each other. Nothing compares.
Sob!
Kiss and Make Up
So you reboot, pick things up where you left off. You accept things can’t always be perfect. The psychologists and marketing gurus call it the “halo effect” – the way attractive people are often judged as having more personality and more skills than someone of average appearance; attributes are praised, weaknesses ignored. Few products can boast such high levels of forgiveness from their owners as the iPhone. You’ll work out a way to live with its imperfections.
Of course, the iPhone isn’t a static product. Its firmware (the code that tells it how to behave) is constantly being updated, with many fixes to existing problems on the way.
And with that, the relationship looks set to sail off into the sunset and live happily ever after.
Is That All There Is?
However, once you’ve fallen for the iPhone, the tendency is to want more of it, vertically, horizontally, sometimes even diagonally. And that’s the problem.
Word to the wise: don’t get married to the thing. So much more is in the pipeline. Expect to see a new version of the iPhone before Christmas: more colors, improved capabilities, better bells and whistles.
This will no doubt be a sore spot for existing iPhone owners who thought, “This is the one!”
Perhaps the only thing to truly regret about your summer fling is that you are now addicted to love.
