haniblog

Now here’s a wonderful device. In the words of one of my colleagues, “This is by far the best thing I have ever bought.” I couldn’t agree more.

I bought our iPhones on the night they were released here in London (6:02pm as I recall). I remember how enthralled I was with it. The touch screen flicking action even skewed my interaction with my MacBook Pro! I kept on wanting to flick the touchpad upwards to scroll down!

I didn’t want to jailbreak it, happy as I was with everything it did. And that was with the 1.0 software. With the App Store and 2.1 version (let’s not talk about lag–heavy 2.0) it was like having a new iPhone. To add to the joy of having a lot of Apple products around my house, O2 contacted me and offered me a free upgrade to the 3G. I didn’t care that I was locked in for another 18–month contract and I jumped at the chance.

Some of the people at my company are avowed anti–Mac pro–Windows users… and they have iPhones. The Mac–heads have iPhones. What’s more, we all exchange tips, tricks and sometimes minor gripes. We sit around and talk about cool Apps we’d love to see developed for our industry. We borrow each other’s USB cables and email each other podcast links.

And then we have the Blackberry users, and this is what prompted me to write this post. They just don’t seem to care about their Blackberrys. They drop them on their desks, glance at the screen and push the devices to one side, groan when it chirps with a new email/sms/voicemail sound and sometimes curse at them. They never update their Blackberrys and never try to figure out creative ways of using the product.

Here’s the point I’m trying to make and I’m definitely biased. iPhone users seem to be inquisitive and curious, continually tweaking, playing, installing, deleting and updating. We plug in our headphones and listen to music as we work, we watch movies on the Tube ride to work and surf the internet on the bus. We play games as we wait for our Flames to finish rendering. In extreme contast, I haven’t seen a single Blackberry user use the device for anything other than email, texting or using it to make or answer calls.

There is an exception to this usage pattern though. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I bought two iPhones. When I upgraded to the 3G version, Gillian decided to keep her first generation iPhone. My wife is the only iPhone user I know who falls in between the two categories of smartphone users, ie, she loves her iPhone but she drops it… a lot. And every time that happens in front of me, I flinch involuntarily. It’s as if she dropped one of our girls on a cold hard floor. It’s an over-reaction, probably, but not that far from the truth.

I wonder if there are any new Apps in the App Store today?