Kevin’s Word

OK, I know that if I say that the iPhone sucks here, then the Apple fanboys will go “Oh, but Kevin, you haven’t even played with the phone.” So, I have refrained from criticizing the phone until I had one in my hands and played with it for myself. I did just that at the Mall of Louisiana’s AT&T store today, so now that I’ve played with the phone for about 9 minutes, I would like to tell you what I like and hate about it.
Like:

The looks. Off, it looks nice.,

Don’t like:

The keypad. I went to Safari, then tried to bring up this blog. I couldn’t type kevinword.blogspot.com, and that really aggravated me. OK, it took reporters 5 days to learn the phone’s keypad, but I can use other smart phone keyboards just fine.

The bugginess. You see how in the commercials, the phone’s screen flips as you move it sideways. It would only do that once or twice for me. I couldn’t get the iTunes coverflow to come up. Also, in Safari, as I opened Google to try and get this website without typing in the address, I couldn’t see the text well. I tried the double tap, and it wouldn’t zoom in, except for once. I asked an AT&T employee if I was doing it right, and he couldn’t get it to work.

The battery life. It was on a dock, and even though people had been all around the phone, and using it, it had a good charge when I started to use the phone. When I stopped, it was at half-charge. That is ridiculous. I was using the EDGE network, not WiFi, and it still killed battery life.

Finally, it doesn’t replace my iPod. I have a 30 Gig iPod, and this phone doesn’t replace that. The most expensive iPhone ($600 w/2 years of selling your soul to Ma Bell) only holds 8 Gigabytes, while I use 18 gigabytes of space on my iPod.

The biggest gripe is that it’s AT&T, and I still have one year on a two year contract of selling my soul to them.

Anyway, I was there around 5:45, so I got to see the launch. I only expected to see a couple of die hard fans in line. I was a little wrong.
(Taken with camera phone)


They opened at, accordingly to my phone, 5:57 PM, but my timing could have been off. They let about six people in at a time, it took about half-an-hour for the line to be gone, but that’s when everyone else began to arrive and play with the demos.

Today and tommorow are “Ozone Action Day”s here! Am I the only one who thinks that sounds really fun? “C’mon, everybody, it’s an Ozone Action Day!” Yeah, well, it’s despicable! First, all you Al Gore commissioned scientists say we need to ’save the ozone layer’, yet when there is ozone down here you go in a panic and say the sky is falling! So, I hereby declare today Ozone Inaction Day.

Now inorder to prepare for Ozone Inaction Day, there are a couple of things you can do.

Got two people in one car? Why? Take two cars. Take Hummers.

Be sure to continuisly fill up your car’s gas tank. Pay for someone else’s.
You’ll make friends.

Keep your gas cap off. Unless your car annoys you if you do that. If so, get a
new car.

Mow your lawn between 8 am and 5 pm. Mow someone else’s. Make some
money.

Help keep the silly ‘Ozone Action’ stuff down.

I was thinking about this idea I had floating around in my Coke, I mean head (not that there’s much differance nowadays…) and the news that Last.FM, which I use, had been purchased by CBS of all companies made me finally decide and post it.
Yes, Web 2.5. How is it different from Web 2.0? Well, remember the whole culture and hype around Web 2.0? “Power to the people!” “It’s goin’ to replace the desktop!”. Yeah, that. Well, we lose it. Last.FM’s purchase by CBS only outlined it to me that this is the future. The bottom line is that right now Web 2.0 is really a lot of start ups, funded by investors, trying to give away a product and at the same time monetize off of it. The issue: it hasn’t been that successful. The only real plan for these web startups is: get acquired by a Google or a Yahoo. I’ve always thought that eventually Google and Yahoo would take a break. They had to. They have. Now, the large media companies of yesteryear are coming back, with deep pockets and a vengeance. We saw that with MySpace and News Corp. It’s only a matter of time before major news, TV, and especially music companies come in, and begin acquisitions.
What does that mean? That mean those corporations we were supposed to be getting away from with the Web, will be coming back into power. They will be ruling the Web, just like music, TV and newspapers. It was only a matter of time. What does that mean? It means the loss of independent voice. Again.