No, I don’t have an iPhone. My mother has one*, but I don’t. They are very pretty, but I don’t quite see the point. Not yet. Because my mobile is only OK-but-not-great for web browsing, I don’t do it much. Key times for web browsing so far have been:
- waiting for a train
- waiting for my husband who is in the hardware store, whilst I sit in the car with sleeping kids
- waiting for the bank teller to methodically stamp his/her bits of paper and open/shut drawers.
I am very attracted to the iPhone’s clean, modern look. If I buy one, I am sure I will use it a lot, and then wonder how I coped without it. Until then, I am happy to not know what I am missing.
*My mother only uses her iPhone to make and receive calls, so I wouldn’t say that she is fully exploring the rich and varied world of Internet goodness with it. However, she does look very contemporary.
My iPhone observations
Many of the cool iPhone features are cool because they look like the real-life (non-digital) thing they are simulating. When the early-adopters cradled their new itoys in their palms and displayed their latest purchases, they showed me calculators that looked JUST LIKE a real calculator; pinball games that looked JUST LIKE real pinball games ; maps that looked JUST LIKE real maps ….
Why are physical things just automatically cooler when they become digital? Why is one of the definitions of online coolness, how Real it looks?
I can not quite get the hang of the touch screen for typing. I felt very silly because I was typing like a unco-ordinated fish, if a fish was wanting to send a text message. Previous studies have shown that the iPhone keypad is less efficient than physical QWERTY keypads, so I’m not alone.
Brought to you by the InterWeb – clever animals in labs
At the University of Vienna, they have a department of Cognitive Biology. They have pigeons, clever dogs, and even tortoises in their fascinating labs.
A life less digital 