A new mobile phone and computer!
Friday, 12 Jan 2007 | Off-topic
A few days ago I was sitting at my computer at midnight. I had a drink ready and was waiting for something to start on the other side of the world, in San Francisco to be exact. Steve Jobs, the big boss of Apple, was about to deliver his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and I wanted to be among the first to know what was about to come. What was I looking at? Basically, there was somebody in the audience over there who was writing text messages of what was being said on the stage. Myself and other pathetic individuals were watching these messages on our screen as they were rolling in. I was hoping for an Apple mobile phone and a sub-compact notebook computer.
Apple introduced a mobile phone. And it seems to be one incredibly amazing device, I won’t go and list all the features here because you probably don’t care.1 While a lot of those features are really cool and I certainly don’t mind they are there, it is the integration of iPod and mobile phone that is why I will try to get my hands on one as soon as I possibly can. I never wanted an iPod, because I will not hear my phone when it rings. Also, I don’t want to have to carry many devices around with me. I wanted phone, music player and digital camera in one device. And nothing out there2 was good enough for me. So I just decided to buy nothing. I’m glad I didn’t. Because the iPhone does everything I want. Ok, perhaps the digital camera is not so impressive at 2mpx, but whatever. It’s good enough for snapshots and when I want to take real photos I’ll take my Canon with me. What sucks is that the phone will not be available in Europe until November 2007 and in Asia somewhere in 2008. That is a really long time to wait for something. But I’ve waited this long, I’m sure I can wait a little longer. One wish came true. But the other one did not.
There will (for now anyway) be no sub-compact notebook computer. So it looks like I will be replacing my Powerbook with a Macbook sometime this year. My Powerbook is turning 3 in April of this year and is getting sluggish. I can still sort of do what I want to do with it, but the increasing demands that new applications put on system resources are making the it all slow down too much. A black or white Macbook will be the replacement. If history is any guide, May will see a new Macbook be released. And around that time the new operating system will also have been released. So I’ll probably wait until May until I buy my new notebook computer.
- If you do care, go to the iPhone website and be sure to check out several of the quicktours showing you how things work. Espially cool is the iPod one. ↩
- Earlier this year I decided I was going to buy a new phone and it should sport a music player which would let me store about 50 albums (4GB) and a good digital camera. I found several phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung that can do this. The problem is that all music players just showed a listing of mp3 files and didn’t sort them properly for me so I could just select an album to play or something. The only player that would do that ran on Nokia phones, but those phones were really really REALLY ugly. And according to Arjan, they sound horrible too. So I just decided nothing was worth my money and continued using my 2 year old Motorola Razr. ↩