Day 7 — 1/9/12
I picked up a case for my iPhone, the Otterbox Commuter, which makes me feel fancy, because it signals my status as a commuter, which I am sometimes unreasonably proud of. Tonight, I struggled the phone into its case like an unwilling body into an S+M outfit, which is also kind of what the case looks like: rubber with plastic reinforcing. Putting on the screen protector was also a total mess since I manage to remove the entire thing rather than just the unnecessary top layer on my first try. At least now I feel like I can put the phone down on a surface without making sure it’s padded and secure first. When will the first drop come!? Hopefully never. Knocking on wood.
Jeff Taylor has been tweeting about the “phone stack,” which consists of having everyone stack their phones up in the middle of a dinner table, thus preventing idle meal participants from distracting themselves checking their email. I really like this idea, because I think we’ve lost the ability to think of verbal conversations as exchanges requiring effort and just view them as the most annoying way to communicate.
Sometimes talking is not fun, but we do it anyway to share some basic humanity, or something like that. The solution to an awkward or prolonged silence is not to pull out your phone.
Days 5 and 6 — 1/7/12 and 1/8/12
Since my laptop is now six years old and totally out of date by Mac standards, the wireless reception also blows. So when I go out to coffee shops I often can’t get any signal, and can’t actually get online. The iPhone’s 3G has definitely helped with this. I can check my email and intermittently go on Twitter and Tumblr without worrying about my shitty computer, and just do all my writing on there. For better or worse, I can’t tether the two via Bluetooth. I think the set up might actually make me more productive. Plus the iPhone’s white case goes so well with the Macbook’s metal. Mm.
I can now suggest that cheapskate NYC denizens download “Subway Map” for a free map of the subway. I have also found that the “Minimalist To Do List” app is amazingly good and free. I downloaded Zach Gage’s “Bit Pilot” game, which seems worth the one dollar it costs. Given the massive number of reviews on indie games in the app store, I can only surmise that it is actually helping a ton of people. Anyway, I feel like my phone has gained a little more utility.
Next step, buying a case.
Day 4 — 1/6/12
I keep getting more used to the phone, but I still feel like I can’t tell people about it, like it’s an embarrassing tumor or something. I was pretty vocal about having a flip phone, so maybe I don’t like capitulating. Anyway, I keep my phone tucked away behind my work computer’s monitor well out of the way. I still spent a lot of time googling the best games to download, though.
So taking your iPhone to the bathroom is like a tried-and-true tradition now, but that doesn’t work for me so well since my office’s bathroom is in the dead center of a giant signal-deadening warehouse fortress. The spinning signal search might as well be a flushing toilet. No way is anyone tweeting in there.
After work I spent some time waiting around in a coffee shop, which is another great place to entertain yourself with a smartphone. I still read a book. Likewise on the subway.
Kind of like at work, I’m still embarrassed about pulling out my phone out to use it in front of people. With a flip phone it’s no big deal. What are you going to do, spend a few minutes making really complicated ASCII smiley faces just to distract yourself from the conversation? But with the iPhone I could be doing anything… playing a game. Checking Tumblr. Getting updates on my non-existent stock portfolio. So instead I make slightly too frequent trips to the bathroom. I don’t think anyone actually cares, really. We’re all used to the existence of smartphones, but I still feel like it’s a novelty. Now, instead of having to endure “sustained periods of non-existence” when people pull out their phones, as Geoff Dyer so memorably put it, I can join in the game.
Day 2 — 1/4/12
Last night, I used my old cell phone (a scratched to shit old flip phone, the only cell Verizon makes that takes international SIM cards) as my alarm clock, just like I did before I got the new animal. I’m not really sure why. Possibly it was because I was nervous the iPhone wouldn’t work and that I couldn’t depend on it to wake me up, but maybe I just didn’t want to sleep with it in the same room. It doesn’t have that slowly pulsing light of a sleeping Macbook, but it feels alive anyway.
In the morning I threw the iPhone box and all into my bag to take to work. It didn’t settle quite right in my pocket, but I got over that soon enough and walked around the office feeling embarrassingly proud of the technology contained in my pants. Soon enough, I assume, we’ll just get this stuff embedded into our skin and won’t even have to worry about looking like we have weirdly-shaped boners at inopportune times. Not that the iPhone is really thick enough for that anyway.
Once I got back home, I started to actually play with the thing. I signed up for the app store and downloaded the usual stuff, Twitter and Tumblr and little else, because actually I don’t know that many apps. I was tickled to hear any NPR station I chose streaming out loud from my phone. I downloaded Lullatone’s Dropophone music-maker and looped it like a bloopy Japanese elevator. Maybe I’ll get Angry Birds eventually, but I stuck with reading a book on the subway today, just to be safe.
People sometimes give names to their cars, but I wonder how many people actually name their phones. It seems like too much of a strict tool to name it, but then mine doesn’t have much of a personality to deserve any kind of name yet. It looks a little less intimidating every time I pick it up, though. As I talked on the phone, I played with the speakerphone setting and suddenly began to understand the utility of handsome wooden iPhone stands.
The Clock app held the secrets to setting a phone alarm. I set three, but I might still keep my old one around.
Day 1 — 1/3/12
I bought the iPhone at the Apple Store in the Meatpacking District on 14th Street and 10th Ave. I got there around 8:25 p.m., and as it turns out, the store stops selling phones at 8:30, so I got there just in time. The red-shirted staff woman who helped me out said that I had actually got the last phone they would sell that day. I felt like the parents of the first child born on New Years Day must when she took the top off a slim cardboard box and revealed my gleaming white charge, an elegantly proportioned rectangle of technology.
The staff woman and I went through the motions of activating the phone on Verizon, and she made it clear that I was to take the lead on entering my data, a troubling prospect considering my terrible smartphone typing skills. “I like to let the customer be the first one to touch their phone,” she said. “Is that so it becomes imprinted with your smell and follows you around like a baby duck?” I asked, but I’m not sure she heard me.
The woman passed me off to another staff member who attempted to transfer the contacts from my old phone to the new monolith. It didn’t work, partly because my old phone doesn’t have a data port, and partly because it didn’t seem to have a proper model number. Eventually I gave up and said that I would try to do it myself. I carried the phone home still in its box, stashed in my totebag.
When I got home and started messing around with my new toy I slowly realized that to sync my laptop’s iTunes to my iPhone, I will have to upgrade my operating system, which basically means that I have to buy a new laptop, since I’m not sure I can get the new OS outside of the app store, which I can’t access because of my outdated OS. Thus technology becomes perilously Kafka. All I want to do is put on a new ringtone :(
After taking a deep breath, I stopped freaking out and realized that I can probably sync stuff at work, where I only recently got a computer any better than my laptop. Minor victory in thought, if not in current reality.
The phone kept going dark on me, probably because I have the sleep time set too short. As I contemplated sleep myself, I was kept up by the piece of technology, perched on top of its shiny cardboard box, too small to cost quite so much but heavy enough to be worth something significant. I put the iPhone back in its coffin and went to bed.
