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Ramblings and Musings of a Man Who Toils in a Cubicle and Yet Still Has Too Much Free Time to Think About Pointless Shit and then Write it Down

Friday, September 9, 2011

iLove my iPhone

I finally made the great leap into the 21st century and got a smartphone. Not just any smartphone, but the most coveted of smarphones, the iPhone. I adore this little device that puts the whole freakin' world in my hands.

It's not the dream device I've described before, capable of storing my entire media library, but it will do for now. The PDF reader is painfully slow when loading large picture books, such as the 1902 Sears Roebuck catalog, but at least I'm able to read my favorite comics any time I wish. My main complaint is Apple's stranglehold on the app market and censorious nature toward submitted apps. Most recently, bending to pressure from loudmouth Congressmen, Apple yanked several apps from the market that allowed users to post the whereabouts of DUI checkpoints. WTF Apple? Did too many people get MADD at you? At least they still have trapster, which will have to serve as a back-door DUI reporting app. Get a "live police" alert late at night and just assume it's a checkpoint.

Speaking of apps, of course after getting my sexy new iPhone I immediately went shopping for sexy apps to make my life easy and sexy and awesome. I added apps to my arsenal such as conversion calculators, bar code scanners, trapster, a police scanner, local and national news apps, Wikipedia, IMDB.com, Redbox, and of course the TMZ app.

As of May of this year, only about 35% of adults have a smartphone, so for now I feel that I have a keen advantage over the other 65% due to my instantaneous access to damn near any kind of information I desire. Trapster tells me where the pigs are hiding. Breaking news is within instant reach, instead of having to go to a computer or channel surf. Wikipedia and IMDB are there for me to satisfy intellectual or pop-cultural curiosity. Redbox gives me a jump on the suckers waiting in line at the machine. The Papa John's app lets me order 'za when I'm still 15 minutes from home, so it will show up at my door, without having to talk on the phone to a brain-dead teenage clerk. I can shop on amazon.com anywhere the mood strikes me. I can be that dick-bag who goes into a store and scans the bar codes to find better prices online. With the help of the Fast Customer app, I no longer have to go through an endless string of recordings before getting to a live customer service rep. Let the huddled masses who don't have smartphones waste precious minutes of their lives doing the touch-tone shell game. My local supermarket even has an app that lets me order deli sandwiches in advance, so I don't have to wait in line at the counter. Were I bidding ferociously on something on eBay, I could place my winning bid anywhere. I have instant access to youtube's wealth of mindless crap. I can stay up-to-date with celebrity gossip on the john at work while the other 65% of the population pooping at work remain completely cut off from civilization. Oh, how iLove my iPhone!