*Phone

Pigs in the sky. Wintry mix in hell. I buy an Apple product.

Spoiler alert: its really great.

I’ve always hated Apple products. Not necessarily because they are inferior products per se, but because of the sheep that worship Steve Jobs in the cult of Apple. So when I walked out of the Shadyside Apple store with a bright white decorative bag containing an iPhone 3G, I felt … dirty. “Look at me, holding this ridiculous bag designed such that no matter how I hold it people walking past me can see the scarlet iPhone 3G logo. I am a giant Apple billboard. I am sure it is visible from space. I could check using the Google maps satellite view with the iPhone. NO! That’s ridiculous.” There was even an apple store employee standing outside the store clapping and HUGGING people who bought this thing. I say again: HUGGING PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY BOUGHT A PHONE. Luckily she was gone when I walked out of the store, no doubt to go take another hit of acid.

Why did I submit myself to this torture? Was it because all of the AT&T stores I went to first looking for the phone were sold out?

Partially. But the phone itself is great. It does so, so many things I’ve wanted a phone to do for years, and it does them simply and easily. Here are some highlights:

• google maps with GPS support (definitely the killer app)
• fast browsing with a non-crippled browser (except for flash support) with 3G
• pandora for free
• identification of any song with Shazam
• can control iTunes running on any computer remotely
• its an ipod too

Those of you with Blackberries are like “so?” and those of you with Samsung’s Instinct are like [sound of crickets], but you have to keep in mind that I upgraded from a dinky flip phone. There are a few things I don’t like:

• I don’t know if its possible to get gmail to push instead of fetch, but it’s definitely fetching right now
• Apps aren’t persistent. For instance, you can’t do anything else while listening to pandora, it won’t run in the background. Weather isn’t persistent, you have to open the application for it to be updated.  Same with Google Talk.  I’m sure that sort of stuff would suck the battery dry.
• Speaking of the battery life: it is not stellar - which makes me sort of scared to use it as an ipod full time
• No tethering? which hasn’t been an issue yet really
• The google map doesn’t follow your gps dot, the gps dot just happily wanders off the screen

Anyway, I intend to redeem myself with a followup post on why I still don’t think Apple alone is the long term solution.