Have I Become a Luddite?
In 1993, Apple Computers released the Apple Newton. It was one of the first PDA devices ever released into the market. The device was to change the very nature of our relationship with computers. Put the desktop into your pocket, un-cable the computing experience, change the way we organize ourselves, put a rabbit in every pot, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, etcetera, etcetera...
Realistically, it did none of the above. It got the geeks among us thinking harder about things like handwriting recognition and small-display data organization. But even when the far-more-successful Palm was released three years later in 1996, the revolution was still nowhere to be found.
As we flash forward more than 12 years, the latest trend has return to Apple's stable, with the release of the iPhone 3G. Again, with its "blazing fast" Internet connection, its growing library of applications and its sleek interface, it puts the desktop in your pocket, un-cables the computing experience, changes the way we organize ourselves, blah blah blah...
And I'm just not buying it.
I've had an assortment of PDAs and SmartPhones over the years. I went fully-connected with an Ethernet card and even a GPS receiver for my HandSpring. I played around with booting Linux and doing full-scale computing on my iPaq. I've read my e-mail on my cell phone -- at fantastic expense, I might add.
Yet everywhere I turn, all I hear about is the iPhone (or its handicapped cousin, the iPod Touch). My brother, the musician, calls me with ideas, wanting me to code up applications we can sell through the iTunes store. My father goes and buys brand new networking equipment for his house just so he can be online with the iPhone wherever he is in the house. I know people who waited in line for more than 6 hours to get theirs, as I'm sure we probably all do.
Yet in the end, it's a shocking amount of money to spend on what is, in the end, a sub-par computing...
