The Mad Rants of a Raving Genius

Call it the Snakes on a Plane effect. Something gains immense popularity based solely on hype. Everyone thinks it’s going to be amazing, but none of those people have any actual evidence of that something’s awesomeness. Good examples are the movie Snakes on a Plane (much ballyhooed by teh Interweb but sucked massively), politician Ron Paul (acts like a libertarian, but is just as anti-everything as the next Republican), and the recently released iPhone.

Surprisingly, the iPhone didn’t (completely) succumb to the SoaP effect. Yes, it was being hyped way before it was even officially announced in 2004, but the hype appears to have been justified. I mean, this is Apple we’re talking about. Look at how successful the iPod is and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Anyways, if you were wondering, I don’t own an iPhone. I wish I did, but I’m happy with my current phone…for now. Maybe when the price drops I’ll get one, but for now I’m as iPhone-less as the next guy. However, my aunt does have one, so I got to play around with it and see how well it really worked. To my surprise, it worked very, very well. When I first heard about the iPhone’s near-complete reliance on a touch screen, I was skeptical. Most touchscreens I’ve come across aren’t very sensitive, often assuming you touched something all the way on the other side of the screen you actually touched. The best screen I’ve used was on a tablet PC, but you were only able to use a stylus for that. With the iPhone, it’s all with your fingers. However, the screen works extremely well, in my opinion. It doesn’t freak out when you use two fingers (try doing that on a laptop touchpad); in fact, two fingers are often used to stretch or pinch things like photos or maps. It really did work amazingly well, as did the whole turning the phone on it’s side, which would let you display things in a widescreen format. It’s a fairly intuitive device.

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about having to use the iPhone with AT&T, but that bit of knowledge doesn’t really bother me, perhaps because I already use AT&T for phone service. Another grievance I’ve come across is that the wireless data service AT&T uses, or EDGE, is crap (in that it’s really slow and shows you more established or bigger websites faster than others, or somesuch), but it should be noted that you only need to use EDGE if you aren’t connected to a regular wi-fi connection, in which case, the Internet works as well as it should. While I don’t care much for Safari, the built-in browser on the iPhone, it works better than I thought as well. It’s really easy to zoom in on web pages and everything on the page scales very well, whether it’s zoomed in or zoomed out.

I’m not going to say the iPhone is perfect, but it does work a lot better than I thought it would. My opinion is that it really is a nice piece of work compared to similarly-priced smart phones. Will I get one soon? Not at the price it’s at now, but I might consider it in a year or so. I’ve been wanting a smart phone for a while, and this is certainly the best I’ve ever tried.