June 23, 2010, will go down in history as one of the craziest days in sports and news for a long, long time. The USA gets a miracle goal at the final gasp from Landon “Hollywood” Donovan to win their World Cup group for the first time in eighty years. A big lurch from Georgia and an irritable Frenchman play a ten-hour tennis match that ends up drawn 59-59 in the fifth set. The President of the United States deals with the highest-profile case in decades of senior military gone off the reservation by relieving the general of his duties in what may be the #1 trouble hotspot on Earth right now. How crazy was this day? A Hall-of-Fame former NFL linebacker was arrested and charged with sexual assault against an underage prostitute, and it slipped through the cracks.
All of that combined to make quite a distraction. Because I’m supposed to make pickup on an iPhone 4 tomorrow.
It wasn’t meant to be like this originally. I had planned to skip the iPhone 3G when it came out – for me, 3G was nothing but a waste of battery life and I wasn’t prepared to pay $300 up front and an extra $240 over two years just for GPS. And assisted GPS at that. Bad arithmetic. Then my dock connector got packed full of lint and shorted right out, and three months after it was released, I had to go to an AT&T store and pick up a 3G, because it cost the same as buying a refurb replacement unit for my existing iPhone.
My father-in-law still has that iPhone, and I mean to keep it, because it’s the one I was given while I was still taking Himself’s shilling along with every other employee of Cupertino Hexachrome Produce Holdings, Ltd. And I missed it. I missed the flatter back, I missed the heft and feel of the aluminum casing. And when the iPhone 3GS came out, I was sore that I couldn’t take advantage of a handset that finally included legit video capture, a faster processor, and double the RAM. My only consolation was that if I waited another year, somebody was bound to push things further.
Then Android came out. The G1 was the first iPhone challenger good enough to be worth criticizing, but it wasn’t enough to tempt me. Neither was the myTouch. Then Android 2 dropped, and the Droid, and then the Nexus One – and all of a sudden, there was an iPhone challenger not only good enough to criticize, but good enough to consider for myself – especially with AT&T’s network sagging under a load it was unable and unwilling to bear. And I looked at the $530 price tag on the Nexus One, and I did math on T-Mobile’s plans, and I ultimately decided to give Cupertino until the end of the summer to return serve. After all, I wasn’t out of contract until September 15, so I had to wait anyway. And if there was no new iPhone, or if it didn’t meet the challenge, well, I had an alternative.
And then, the announcement.
Everything I could have hoped for in moving up from the 3G – faster processor, more battery life, better camera (with LED flash and HD video capture!) and a more compact package with the heft and density I’d missed. Sure, some of the benefits of 4.0 will be nice (although I still think multitasking is more for the geeks than a practical benefit for me – an improved notification system would have been better), but what I needed was a change in hardware. And I’m going to make a much better jump than I would have last year.
Now I just have to battle through the paste-eaters. I’m not using one of the more prominent Bay Area Apple stores, and it’s close enough to walk from work, so I’m hoping to avoid a massive crowd of paste-eaters camping out. Because I’m not after some sort of status symbol or fetish icon – I’m after a better phone than what I’ve got. And I’m pretty sure this is it.