January 10, 2012

What Can I Say? The iPhone is a Good Product!


So on November 2010, I walked into an Orange (the name of my Israeli cell carrier) store, and told them I was tired of my Nokia 5800 'smartphone'. I won't go into the details of why I did not love it, but I didn't. I asked them if they could offer me something better.
They said sure. Because I was a student I could get an iPhone for 149 shekels a month (about 40$), and if I talked that amount I would pay no extra charges. At the time I was really in awe with Google (more about Google later in this series), so I asked if there were any Android smartphones available. There were, but they were more expansive. I have no idea how that made economic sense, but only about now Android phones and tablets are beginning to be cheaper than their iOS counterparts here.
So I said, OK I'll get an iPhone (3GS). I've had it for about a year (now I have the the iPhone 4, but more about that next week). 
Though some people are not too thrilled that I can't be reached whenever I'm next to my children (because they play with it), it's a good machine.
I've bought apps, I've bought Kindle books and read them on it, I took some really good pictures (not on any artistic level, just pictures I'm happy with). I can read mail. I'm very pleased.
It's the first Apple product that I actually owned, and I like it.
But does it live up to the hype? I'm not so sure!
So once again, it's hard to call something 'insanely great', because we are all looking for different things, and facing different limitations (remember no iTunes here, but also severely limited podcasts, no buying videos etc.)
So going back to the subject of these posts, Steven Jobs.
There can be little doubt that the man pushed the envelope, with the iPhone, with the iTunes store, with the original mac etc. but other guys pushed too, and some of them were nicer, or just plain pushed harder IMHO.
Steve was one of the good guys (in terms of contribution to society), but I don't think that he was the BEST or anything like that.



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