iPods and Smartphones

Last summer I took a plane trip to L.A., flying coach as usual.  I was fumbling in my seat with the CDs, swapping them in and out of the CD player.  And when it came time to use the CD player in the rental car, it was the same deal.  My music selection was limited to whatever CDs I happened to bring with me.  The rental car’s stereo had an AUX input.  And I’m thinking…”what if there were a small, convenient, portable device on which I could store several CDs at once, not merely 5-10, but more like 100?”  Of course, this device has existed for some time, idiot – it’s called an iPod!  D’oh! 

            I suppose what had kept me from being interested in the iPod earlier was its fairly small gigabyte capacity.  I had filled up an 80 gig external hard drive fairly easily, without coming close to representing my full music library of CDs.  But when I learned of the iPod Classic, with its 160 gig hard drive, I began to get seriously interested. 

            Long story short, I got an iPod Classic for Christmas, a gift from my girlfriend and her son, which they even had engraved.  I learned to sync it with my computer at home, and I was good to go.  I even got the cable to hook it up to my Neon’s stereo – the Formula stereo is not iPod compatible – and some excellent headphones as well.   I also got an RCA cable which hooks up to the iPod, meaning I can plug into line-in’s on boom boxes, Bose Wave Radios, or regular stereo receivers.  And to protect the thing, as it has a snazzy chrome finish, I’ve got a black rubberized plastic cover, almost like a wetsuit.

            Ultimately I should get a 160 gig external hard drive for iTunes at home, so I can take full advantage of the capacity of the iPod Classic.  It’s a fantastic invention, one I was fairly slow to adopt.

 Smartphone.  I can’t say iPhone, although that would make a snazzier title.  Back in 2005, I bought my prior cell phone, a Sharp TM-150, from T-Mobile.  I had just gotten back from Rio de Janeiro where I had found out that despite T-Mobile cell phone service being available there, my prior phone wouldn’t work because it was a two-band phone, and in Rio they use the third band which this phone didn’t support.  The TM-150 was a tri-band phone…except that I didn’t end up going to Rio again after buying the phone.  But it worked fine in Bucharest!

            Fast forward to 2011, and by now this TM-150, which was state of the art in 2005 – and the source of jealousy of my tech-savvy secretaries who insist on having the most advanced cell phones to satisfy their social lives, and text each other and their friends incessantly – was now a dinosaur…close to Gordon Gekko’s 1985 vintage phone.  Well, it did flip open like the Star Trek communicator!  I even got the Star Trek communicator ringtone.  It could take 8 second video clips and had a SD card which held dozens of pics; the resolution on the screen was a million megapixels.  As I said, very advanced for 2005.  But finally the battery started crapping out, which seemed to be the physical interface where the charger hooks up, not the battery itself, a structural problem which simply meant that physically, the cell phone was finally wearing out.

            So I got a T-Mobile MyTouch 4G.  I wanted to keep T-Mobile, and while tempted by the iPhone 4G, it seems that Android compatibility is fairly decent by now.  It has an 8GB SD card, but the card is buried inside the phone and not easily accessible the way the one on the Sharp was.  Ringtones are simple: instead of having to download specific ringtone files, or use some ringtone editor, the MyTouch allows you to simply select MP3s as ringtones.  I can listen to the mp3s too, but the 8GB capacity is far lower than the 160 GB capacity of the iPod, so it’s not really practical as a general music player.  Likewise, .jpg files uploaded to the phone’s SD card act as wallpapers, although this is more or less the same deal with the Sharp.

            For text messaging, I can now use a little full keyboard instead of punching the numeric keypad multiple times – 4 times for “S” – ad nauseam.  I’m beginning to get the hang of the Swype feature…slowly but surely.  The camera has a flash, and takes fairly decent pics, though not as good as my 14 megapixel Kodak digital camera.  On the other hand, it lets you modify the pics in various ways, some of which are pretty cool.  

            The net feature is pretty good, although it’s damn slow.  Although the apps availability isn’t as good for Androids as it is for iPhones, I have downloaded the apps for movies – so I can immediately check out showtimes for local theaters – and Netflix.  I’ve been using the Kindle feature to read a few books, mainly some Star Wars novels only available in that format.  And the Maps app is pretty much a GPS which works the same way.  Even the woman’s voice is the same (“recalculating!”).  I’ve yet to use the video chat feature; my GF doesn’t have a smartphone yet…her son has a Blackberry Torch and her niece has an iPhone 4G.

            If I have one major beef with the phone it’s the slide and drag type of interface instead of buttons.  But that seems more a matter of a superior interface which simply takes time to get used to, than buttons being inherently superior.  I’m still learning all the useful features the phone has; my secretary, who has had iPhones since they came out and is fairly familiar with Smartphone technology, has been useful at explaining many of the features to me. 

            In short, the “smartphone” really is much more useful and versatile than the old style phones, and I’m sure as time goes by the apps will multiply…to the point where we’ll begin to wonder, as we do with cell phones now, how we ever got along without them.