Thought of the day: The iPhone doesn’t feel like a phone and thats good.
I was scrolling through various news feeds on my RSS reader this morning and reading lots of speculation about Mondays WWDC keynote when I realized something about how I regard my own iPhone. I no longer see it as a phone. In fact, It’s hard to pin down what exactly it is, but from a purely emotional point of view, I no longer see it as a phone, or an ipod but as something else…I suppose as an iPhone. And in part I suspect that’s why it has been so successful, because it has moved past existing paradigms and created it’s own unique category for itself.
People will argue that it’s just another smart phone, but I’ve had smart phones before, and all of them frustrated me to the point that I wanted to throw them off the balcony. Their “smart” features weren’t that smart and the phone side of them are in general pretty atrocious. But with the iPhone, I don’t feel like I’m using a phone at all. Instead I have this device that gives me a permanent connection to the larger world. It’s a small black and silver slab that connects me to cyberspace wherever I am and I am always linked to the immediacy of breaking news, information I need, train times, current weather or whatever else is happening around the globe. It’s a powerful feeling that becomes part of everyday life because unlike other smart phones which also have internet access, it’s so easy to use, you just use it without thinking about it. We’ve always read in science fiction about the connected world, about how everyone will be part of a great network, but with the iPhone Apple made it happen, and in such a seamless way, that most people don’t realize the future is already here.
Subscribe To RSS feed