It’s Definitely Not Just a Cellphone

For those of you who have been following this blog you know that I have been contemplating buying an iPhone for weeks (read “The Technology Keeps Changing” posted May 25, 2009). If you recall an earlier post I made the conversion from calling the iPhone a cellphone to referring to it as a hand-held computer. I GOT IT!

The decision to buy was really motivated by the old Nokia flip phone that I mentioned in the earlier blog. The battery started going dead after one phone conversation. Not good! It was a smart phone, but not as smart as the iPhone.

I walked into the AT&T store at the corner of Franklin and Monroe in downtown Chicago during my lunch hour. I passed the store every night on my way to the train station so I thought, what the heck. When I walked into the store it was crowded. The first thing I thought was, “Ooops! This might take longer than my lunch period.” However, I was greeted at the door by a gentlemen who pointed to the young woman standing next to him named Kristine.

We walked over the kiosk and Kristine began to hook me up with the iPhone, which included the 2-year warranty, a phone case and car charger. Then she took my old phone to the back of the store and transferred my numbers to the new phone. The whole transaction took 20 minutes. I couldn’t believe it! I actually had time to walk a few blocks to pick up lunch before going back to the office.

On the way to lunch, I decided to call my friend Mike Biebart who is like a walking billboard for the iPhone and anything Apple. Mike is a really cool dude. We met over 10 years ago when we both worked on BlackVoices.com in Orlando. Mike and I were among the eight or ten BV staffers who made the transition from Orlando to Chicago when the Tribune Company invested $5 mil into Black Voices. Mike was one of the web producers while I was an online sales exec. He is extremely talented and pulled off some award-winning work for BV until it was sold six years ago to America Online. We both left and did our own thing until two years ago when we ended up working together again for the same advertising agency.

It was at the agency Christmas party where Mike kinda had me sold on the iPhone. I mentioned that I had forgotten to log on to Southwest Airlines to check in and get my boarding pass. I was leaving later that afternoon for Florida. Mike whips out his iPhone punches up the SWA site and asks, what’s your confirmation number? I gave it to him, he punched in my  name and BAM! there it was. I was checked in SWA’s B section. I thought, “Wow! That’s pretty cool!”

However, the problem at that time was the iPhone was selling for $400. And if you remember my earlier post, I couldn’t wrap my head around spending that much money for what I thought was just a freakin’ cell phone. Even this example proves I didn’t get it. It’s not a cellphone, it’s a handheld computer.

So leaving the AT&T store headed to get lunch the first call I made on my brand new iPhone was to Mike. And he laughed cause he knew exactly why I was calling. I could hardly hear him because of the traffic and truthfully, I had no clue how to turn up the volume, but we chatted for a couple of minutes and agreed to catch up later.

When I got back to the office, Mike had sent me a text message offering to help if I had any questions. I thought that was really sweet of him. I tried to respond back but quickly learned that in order to use the touchscreen keyboard I needed to cut my fingernails.

After responding to Mike via text, I loaded my Yahoo email and sent a message to my manicurist, Jess, who also has an iPhone. I simply typed in the subject line: “Guess what I got?” and left the body blank as the email is tagged, “sent from my iPhone.” Jess called back and expressed how pleased she was with my new purchase and encouraged me to check out the app store.

I did. So far I’ve downloaded Twitter, Facebook, NYTimes, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, ESPN, USAToday and more. Oh, and I’m following President Obama on Twitter but I’m going to have to “defriend” the President. No offense, but whoever is keeping him plugged in to his consituency is sending way too many Tweets… all hours of the day and night. My first night I was awaken multiple times by incoming Tweets from Obama. I didn’t figure out how to silence the phone until a coworker let me in on it the next day.

So, yeah, I’ve been walking around with this silly grin on my face for almost a week now. I’ve uploaded pictures to my Facebook page, did a ReTweet of an Obama Tweet (just to see if I could do it), checked and responded to email, followed along in church during the scripture reading (yep, found a Bible app too), and uploaded over 400 songs from my iPod to my iPhone. The only thing left to do now is organize my contacts. The transfer from Nokia along with the synch to MS Outlook left my contacts are all discombobulated.

I get it now more than I did before…the iPhone is not a cellphone, it’s tuly a hand-held computer and worth every dime!