iPhone you, iPhone you not.
Well only a few more months until I can get the heck out of Coos Bay! It was great getting back up to the Puget Sound area to visit friends and family; unfortunately four days in, and I developed a magnificent cold which I just could not shake for love nor money. While the cold kept me at bay on Jane’s couch for the majority of my stay, that down time did allow me great opportunity for research, and Jane’s new iPhone gave me the perfect target. If you have never used an iPhone, it’s kind of hard to describe why all the fuss. In all my years of geekery, I have never seen a better example of a Solution Looking For A Problem. It becomes a habit, innocently at first ‘What times is it?’ ..look at the iPhone, ‘Where is 4th and Union from here?’ call up Maps on the iPhone, ‘Where is the closest Indian restaurant?’ launch Yelp on the iPhone, ‘How are my stocks doing? What is the weather going to be tomorrow? Which way is north? What were the NY Times headlines today? etc. etc., and this is just the little stuff. You can turn your iPhone into a full on chartplotter for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated Garmin. Don’t have an anemometer? There is an app for that! So you can see I was getting pretty involved in my lust for this iPhone. However, I was still up in Seattle, and I vowed I would not do anything rash, at least until I got back down to Coos Bay.
Well after three weeks in Seattle, I was suggested an unlikely cure for my cold in the way of a trip to Phoenix. It shows how far I have crept out of my old hermit life that my initial response was not “No, can’t do it, too many things to do, not in my plans, etc.” Now, I have to admit ‘Phoenix’ and ‘paradise’ are two words I was unlikely to ever use in a sentence, but walking around in shorts and a t-shirt in January certainly can change one’s mind; and while I had initially thought the area was nothing but dirt with the occasionally manicured lawn, getting out and doing some hiking proved to me there was great beauty there, it just wasn’t the ‘in your face’ kind of beauty I was used to. It was a nice lazy week and the Phoenix sun burned that cold right out of me. Phoenix you impressed me!
All this time away from Ivy was giving me an unsettled feeling. This is longest I had been away from her in three years, and while I couldn’t think of any one thing that could cause me concern, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to get back to Coos Bay. Well after a very hectic day of travel I arrived back aboard and found absolutely nothing a miss, and waking up the next day to a cold, dreary, overcast and rainy morning made me wonder what the hurry to get back was all about. Oh well, home again, home again, jiggity jig.
My time in Phoenix did not make me forget about the iPhone, as a matter of fact I kept finding ways it would enrich my life. As I had previously mentioned, my internet connection here in Coos Bay is wonky.. ‘There is an app for that’; although it is not something AT&T nor Apple condone, you can tether the iPhone to your laptop, turning the iPhone into a wireless 3G modem, pretty darn cool. Also there is Skype for the iPhone, which allows users to make unlimited phone calls all over USA and Canada for $30/year, never using your AT&T minutes. If this is all starting to sound like an ad for iPhone… let me cut to the chase. I did it, I went to the AT&T store and signed up for a two year contract, and got my shiny white iPhone 3GS 16GB phone. For thirty days and thirty nights I adored my iPhone; downloading apps, listening to MP3′s, getting involved in iPhone forums online, until the day I read on the web “Under no circumstance will AT&T unlock an iPhone so it can be used on another carrier”. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I sign an exclusive contract with AT&T for two long years, at the end of which I OWN the phone outright, and I cannot then take MY iPhone to a foreign country and use a local carrier? This small print, made this gorgeous, piece of technological art completely useless to me. With a very heavy heart, on the last day of my trial period, I returned the iPhone to AT&T. My life has gone grey, no longer checking the weather every twenty minutes, downloading apps like Virtual Cowbell, seeing how fast I can run by watching my dot on the GPS unit in Maps, nor smugly pulling out my iPhone when deep in conversation, some obscure fact comes into question. Never again to utter the words ‘There is an app for that’. iPhone how I miss thee!
Randy
S/V Ivy
March 30, 2010 at 2:01 am
I never looked specifically at your model of Iphone, but a lot of people have unlocked their’s. It’s in the same genre as jailbreaking from what I’ve seen.
March 30, 2010 at 4:24 am
Actually yes, I didn’t want to go full on geek here in my blog; so at the expense of being less technical I glossed over some issues. I had purchased a new iPhone 3Gs with the new bootloader that requires one to tether their Jailbreak. I actually had my iPhone Jailbroken this way the whole time I had it, but I felt particularly vulnerable that every time I might have to reboot the iPhone, I needed to be near my computer. I do not know if GeoHot has gone ahead and fixed the tethering issue with the new bootloader, but I could not risk the issues associated with it.
Thanks for the comment and suggestion!
April 15, 2010 at 11:14 pm
I’ve just finished reading your blog. Very well done. Sounded like an adventure. I will look forward to future posts. Thank you for sharing.