iPhone Therefore I Am

Last weekend, while down in Corning, I lost my cellphone. As you could well imagine, I was distraught for well over a nanosecond. Now, I liked the basic idea of the BlackBerry, but the device itself was not well designed and I never really did like it all that much, despite the fact that I relied on it heavily for mobile e-mail access, even if it was a really crappy cellphone (or, in other words, a cellphone).

So Friday morning I went down to Crossgates Mall to the Apple Store and splurged on an iPhone. Leave it to Apple to get me to like a cellphone. It is everything the BlackBerry should have been. It synced up both my e-mail accounts (and uses basically the same Apple Mail application I use on my laptop. It connects to the Internet through an available Wi-Fi network or, if there isn't one, it uses AT&T's network. The Web browser is basically Safari and accesses most Web pages identically to how pages are accessed on a computer. It's a tinier screen, of course, but the zoom feature works pretty well, and if you turn the iPhone horizontally, it automatically flips the display to widescreen. AT&T gets a bad rap, but the people in the AT&T store in Crossgates couldn't have been nicer and more helpful in setting up an account and porting my mobile number over from Sprint. I have had no problems accessing the AT&T network and saratoga appears to be well covered. I was easily able to surf the Web while on the bus, or out at Happy Hour (we were trying to find out what restaurants were participating in Restaurant Week and I was easily able to access the appropriate site.

My only gripe is the onscreen keypad which requires fingers the size of a two-year-old's. But I am getting better at it. In fact, this post was created on the iPhone, and wasn't too onerous at all

In sum, I love my iPhone--losing my cellphone was probably the best thing that ever happened!