No iPad or iPhone for me, Thankx but No thankx !

I have never been an early adopter. The last time I bought anything as soon as it came out was about 1980 , and I bought a VCR that weighed about 50 lbs, had clunky noisy buttons and took forever to rewind a tape. It was way over priced and I learned my lesson with that experience.

Up until very recently I had a Sam sung flip phone that was about 6 years old. No camera, no video, no email, no web browsing, no touch screen, no music player, no ring tones and no texting, but it made a great telephone. Then, sadly, it died and had to be replaced. As I went through all the options with the phone store salesperson, I was struck by the oddity of some of the options available and thought to my self "How badly do I really want a device that does a bunch of stuff, but none of it very good?".

The salesman was gaa-gaa over the iPhone and couldn't wait to tell me all about its "features"., and how cool it was. She kept saying "...and it does this (insert feature) , isn't that cool?". The more I heard about it the less impressed I was. The music player option means I am tethered to the iTunes store. The apps options means I am tethered to the "Apps store". The more I saw the less I wanted to be tethered to one company for anything and the problem is I know I am not the demographic as well. I let her keep explaining things until I said "How is it as a phone ?". She seemed stunned by the question. But...You get widgets, you get widgets !!

So anyway, I learned a long time ago that if you are an early adopter of technology a few things are usually true. For one, you usually pay more than twice what it will sell for 12-18 months from now. Another thing that is pretty common is that the first versions of almost everything technology related, doesn't work as advertised. Not only that, the basic things it is supposed to do, it usually doesn't without an enhancement, a service pack or a new item. Lastly, there is always either the promise of things to come (which may or may not appear) or the glaringly obvious functions that it doesn't have, like the seriously ancient technology of 1993 called "multi-tasking".

As it turns out , I have pretty fat fingers and the touch screen is pretty sloppy. I hated it and hate their commercials and the sappy music that goes with it. Want to know where you parked your car? There's an app for that. Sheesh. You can't get it to respond to fat fingers and it ignores the input altogether if you hit the edge of two "keys", but somehow , that is better, because Steve Jobs said so. What ever.

I remember the roll out of Windows 95 , the big marketing commercials that Bill Gates sponsored when the first version of GUI windows came out , together with the midnight madness, the worldwide new coverage, the long lines of people waiting to buy their very own copy and then when the announcer starts to explain something to Bill and then "BSOD". Funny as hell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VILt5JS7Lk

So anyway , I opted for a Blackberry Bold. Been around forever, 8th or 9th version it, worked right out of the box, lots of cool features that all do pretty well and I'm pretty happy with it.

So why do I not want an iPad? I can't remember the last time I sat on a train, looking for a girl to share something with. I don't want to run down the street dancing to my shadow with white ear plugs in (full disclosure- I have an iPod shuffle, but don't use it all that much), It doesn't play any Flash enabled web sites, I read real books so I cannot figure out what I would do with it in the first place. Is it supposed to replace my Desktop ? or my network? or my laptop ? or my phone? Or is it just another example of market share being gobbled away by another conglomerate by selling us more stuff that there really isn't a defined purpose for. I mean it doesn't have a camera, you can't shoot video with it, there is basically no porting on it and not much storage so what is this thing good for? I can't figure it out, unless I am a college student or I want to read an e-book or fill out an electronic form. Maybe a doctor or an inspector of some kind could use it, but if it isn't rugged enough to put on a UPS truck, Whats the appeal? Really?

I just don't get the lots of devices in one package format anyway. We all have them, but truly, what works better? The dedicated digital camera or your phone camera? Which is easier to take the pictures off the device , phone or camera? Do you truly think the videos shot with a cell phone are superior to the ones shot with a hand held video camera? It is really all about convenience to be able to send an email with a phone or is it just easy to respond to them?

Of course, I sometimes still use a fax machine too, so go figure.

Thankx for reading my rant !

bigmike

Visit my blog online at http://bigmikerant.blogspot.com/

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