On Tuesday, Rodriguez became the fourth person to line up outside Apple Inc.'s Fifth Avenue store in New York. The 24-year-old college student wants to get a belated birthday gift for her sister as soon as the iPhone starts selling Friday evening....The iPhone will be big (but David Pogue cites a couple of substantial drawbacks in this morning's NYTimes), especially for folks who live in or around big cities (because of what appears to be excellent map access) and it certainly is beautiful (yea, hot) but it won't be for me, at least not for a year or so because I don't really need it. How it pains to say that.
The three people ahead of her all joined the queue Monday, braving temperatures that reached 90 degrees. Their spirits weren't dampened by forecasts for thunderstorms later in the week and remarks such as “Crazy, people are just absolutely crazy” by one passer-by.
AT&T's rate plan does solve one of my problems by making - as I understand it now - the minutes you pay for work with both telephone and data networks, but it's still a lot of money - a locked-in $60/mo. - to do something I don't do now and get on fine without. And the device does access Wi-Fi hotspots, although presumably only for data, not for voice, use. But this could be a problem because in my experience Wi-Fi networks that require navigating a EULA page tend not to support Apple's web browser, Safari. Using Safari once you're logged in is no problem, but logging in requires Firefox or some other browser, none of which, apparently, can be installed on the iPhone. So the fantasy that the iPhone could be used as a cheap and dirty laptop while traveling pretty much crashes there.
Cheap and dirty, I say, of course, only figuratively, since the thing is by no means inexpensive and it's certainly clean. It's spotlessly beautiful, in fact, and yeah, sure, it'll be the next big thing.
Link: Customers line up for Apple's iPhone days before Friday's launch
No comments:
Post a Comment