Koolaid
Well, I resisted for a while, but I finally “drank the koolaid” as the saying goes, and I bought an iPhone. (The koolaid saying is a reference to the Jonestown-I think it was Jonestown-cult that knowingly drank poisoned koolaid because their leader said so.) I have been in the market for a new phone for a while, and while Verizon never did me any real harm, they didn’t have what I considered to be decent PDA-style phones. I had been trying to wait for the new round of Windows Mobile 6 PDA/Smart-phones that have been rumored to be released “soon” before switching to AT&T, and I have purposely avoided playing with the iPhones whenever I was at an AT&T store. But last week the price came down to a reasonable amount, and my boss and one of my coworkers both got one. And I discovered that getting an iPhone does not remove the option for the phone discount if I didn’t like it. So I caved and I ordered a 4GB iPhone from the Apple store, and even waited remarkably patiently until it arrived Friday. (Ordered Tuesday, shipped Wednesday.) And once I knew it was delivered, I couldn’t wait any longer and had to drive home at lunch and get it, along with the powered USB hub I needed to plug it into the MacBook since the USB drive I use for iTunes doesn’t always play nice with syncing my iPod. Plugged the phone in, followed the activation wizard, transferred my number, and then it told me that my activation “required additional time to complete.” Not cool! Some quick Googling revealed lots of horror stories from the initial launch, but not much afterwards, until I found one comment about undocking and re-docking the iPhone. Sure enough, as soon as I ejected it and re-docked it, it activated. Unfortunately, that did not speed up the number transfer, so I had to wait until Saturday night before I could receive calls. But even before the number transferred, I got my email accounts set up so it checks them automatically. And I managed to get my Calendar and Contact info from my Exchange server at work into iCal and Address Book using Entourage and from there into the iPhone. Although I’m still trying to pare down the list of songs that I sync so I have room for a video or two. Oh, and AT&T’s EDGE data network sucks compared to Verizon’s EV-DO, but the readability of the pages on the screen compared to my old PDA more than makes up for that.
So, in addition to my beloved 80 GB black 5G iPod, I have my new 4GB iPhone, and have a purple 1GB iPod shuffle on order to replace the hot pink shuffle I am using now. Because the purple one matches my truck and my purse and the laptop case, and darn it that’s important! All 3 iPods sync with the MacBook because I got tired of trying to keep two libraries up to date, and also just in case I need to sync or charge something when I’m not home. Thank goodness for combo USB Hub/iPod dock devices. I still can’t believe they only put two USB ports on the MacBook.