That first couple of years of the iPhone was a weird time for technology. The original iPhone was unlike anything else out there, and it was a year before an Android device shipped (and arguably another couple after that before an Android device worth comparing shipped, in the Nexus One). But until 2009, there were some pretty hard-and-fast limits with the iPhone – no video capture. No cut and paste. No MMS support. And while the 2-megapixel camera wasn\u2019t appreciably worse than other flagship cameraphones at the time, it’s still ghastly in retrospect to compare the pictures it took to ones that even the iPhone 4 captured.<\/p>\n
That was an era when we were still trying to figure out what \u201cmobile phone computing\u201d would look like. It was obvious pretty quickly, for instance, that Twitter was made for the smartphone. Having a full screen Twitter display, even on a 3.5\u201d 480×320 screen, changed the entire functionality of Twitter. When I created my first Twitter account in February 2007, it was worthless because it was basically only suitable for blast-texting and I didn\u2019t know anyone else on it. I expected it to be a more trimmed-down version of Dodgeball. Instead, two years later, Foursquare launched as a goosed-up version of Dodgeball – and Foursquare is inconceivable without a smartphone with GPS location capability. Dodgeball was of limited utility on the feature phones of 2004, and that\u2019s an app that needs a phone – nobody would use Foursquare from a computer.<\/p>\n
But the thing is, at the time it wasn\u2019t even a sure thing that the iPhone would come to rule the roost in the world of mobile phone computing. The Blackberry was the entrenched device, to the point that my first work phone at my new job in January 2009 was a Blackberry Bold – at the time considered the pinnacle of the type and the best display you could get on a mobile device. Windows Mobile, even in its early craptastic days, was still a thing. Symbian Series 60 still ruled the roost at Nokia, which was putting out devices with a feature set that frankly kicked the shit out of the first-gen iPhone (a 5 MP camera with Zeiss optics in a \u00a02007 device?) and there was still a school of thought that you could get meaningful use out of J2ME versions of Google Maps and Opera Mini proxy browser and an RSS reader on some of the Sony Ericsson high-end handsets.<\/p>\n
I left Apple only a couple of months after getting my iPhone, and then did a year and change as a NASA subcontractor before winding up where I am now. I knew going in that I didn\u2019t want to make a career of the NASA gig, but it would be a few years before I realized how big a mistake leaving Apple was. So I was sort of adrift for a while – I went through three different mental health professionals, finally broke down and tried antidepressants, and went to great lengths to find something<\/em> that would fill the rapidly expanding gaps in my life, whether international soccer or RCIA classes or men\u2019s a cappella chorus or bar trivia or…<\/p>\n These things go together because one of the recurring things in my memory are those liminal periods – like late 1984 and early 1985, for instance, or the autumn of 1997 – when I\u2019m not who I was but haven\u2019t figured out who I am now yet. Things are still malleable, we\u2019re still in between times, the needle hasn\u2019t settled into a groove. There\u2019s still some flexibility before you sink into the New Normal. I think maybe that\u2019s what I\u2019m processing now – trying to engineer myself a reasonably soft landing into whatever comes next. Because right now, it would be nice to put paid to the creeping existential dread for a little while, if I could only figure out how to do it reliably – and reproducibly.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That first couple of years of the iPhone was a weird time for technology. The original iPhone was unlike anything else out there, and it was a year before an Android device shipped (and arguably another couple after that before an Android device worth comparing shipped, in the Nexus One). But until 2009, there were … <\/p>\n