The New Phone

Its been over two years since I bought an Iphone. It was a Iphone Gs with 32 gb. I knew that I would need the next bigger memory one than what comes standard. 16 gbs was just not gong to be enough. My music interests are very diverse. Its been a great phone up until recently when it started to have some issues.

The headphone jack had come loose or modified to the point where only certain headphones would work on it. I had to go the the more expensive Vmoda.. a very good headphone none the less, but even recently on the my walks, I had to jiggle the jack into place and hope it stayed in place as I walked.

Most people would not buy a phone because it has music capabilities. It is one of those things that in the past you carried both a phone and an ipod. Or now just an iphone. My phone is also the one most likely to be used in the car as we travel... so a set of mutually agreeable tunes need to be on it.. namely Carpenters, Beatles, and Croce. My tastes are not always down those rather restrictive channels.

The Iphone Gs was a big improvement over the first Iphones  It speed was much improved and the camera was better.

My first iphone, an Iphone GS, before my wife got was used to look up words and concepts from her reading books as much as making phone calls. Other tasks completed with iphones was a much better text messaging system then my previous cell phones. We all had motorola razors before getting Iphones. It was a genuinely tough job to jump through the multiple keystrokes to get the proper letter that would be made into words for a text message. The touch glass key pad, while a little strange in the beginning, became very utilitarian over the time.

My first iphone GS came with almost an insurmountable problem. All of the menu items and commands were in Danish. Needless to say Danish is not a romance language.. so finding the roots to the words made even getting back to the settings on the home base difficult. I figured it out and since that time it had no interest in living in Copenhagen.


The new Iphone 4 S is a slick little wonder. Its thinner and faster than the last one. And alas, the music does work. Integrated into it is Siri.  I called mom and dad the other day on my walk with just a voice command. When asked how far it was from Merced to Modesto, it picked out the power chair service number and stated to me that it had no address for it and therefore could not comply with a point to point mileage number.... so okay it does have some limitations.. but there were only limitations due to my not having all the info it needed to draw that conclusion.

I had saved the previous Iphone's info to the cloud. The cloud is a new renewed concept in devices. The previous settings from the cloud were transferable when the old chip from the Iphone GS was disabled. I guess my sim chip had changed significantly in design between the last model and the latest model. So the info in the cloud saved my about 30 minutes at the Apple store in transferring my contacts and links to my apps. When I got home and plugged it into my computer it transferred the actual apps I had purchased on to the new phone.

So what have I used the Iphone for besides making calls and listening to music? When we had a tire blowout on the big highway 99, I used the AAA app to call a tow truck. We use it to check to see where the movies are playing and what time they start. The new Iphone collects both email accounts and I am able to check them out during my walk. I play a brain fitness game periodical to keep the processing going with the brain. I use the flickr app to show people photos of my latest paintings. I use the photography app to take photos. The new Iphone allows you to take photos of yourself without have to turn the camera around on you. I have a spell checker program. Sue checks out the latest Huff stories. I check out the sports on the ESPN scoreboard app. We have found a Chevron station using the Chevron gas station app.. even in the middle of running down the freeway in LA.

And then there is facebook. Its nice to catch up on the doings of your friends and family through facebook. We can figure out what the family in Pennsylvania are doing as well as the Colorado family. The daughters often post there whereabouts and activities on facebook. Its nice nice to have access to that info available off the phone as we travel down the road.

So its been good to have an assistant in the form of technology all sitting in the form a cell phone. Its all because instead of just replicating what a cell phone was when Apple got into them.. they invented once again a new genre.