IPhone Cafe

Here’s a cool video with another perspective on the idea of an iPhone Cafe.

You Tube iPhone Cafe

I’ve had my iPhone for maybe three weeks now, and I have more or less fallen in love with it, even though I’ve only used the most basic functions.  I’d like to test drive some games on the thing, although I’m the first to admit that, as a grad student, I hardly need to be throwing my rare spare time into the time pit that is hand held gaming.  I’ve not got any music, no videos, nothing like that, and I still think it’s the coolest thing ever.

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I’ve also discovered that having an iPhone is at the least a good way to break the ice in a crowd, and at best, makes one–however momentarily–the most popular person in the room.  My first experience with this came just last Wednesday, while at a beer tasting and pizza party.  This one guy whipped out his Blackberry and started showing it off to the people around him.  If this had been a game of poker, he had just laid down a two pair of fours and sixes.  Unfortunately for him, the iPhone is like a straight flush.  “Yeah, the Blackberry’s cool, I guess,” I said to a guy sitting next to me, “but I prefer the iPhone.”  “You have an iPhone?” he asked, so I pulled it out and handed it over for him to inspect.  Instantly there were three different guys crowded around him clamoring to try it out.  There had been a fair amount of alcohol consumption at this point, so some of these dudes were happy to just touch the screen and whiz from feature to feature.  The first guy was sober enough to do Google searches, but his constant giggling made me fear what kinds of things he was looking up.

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Just a couple days later, I was out with a different group of friends and, pleased with the reception my new toy had gotten last time, I pulled it out on some lame pretense of having to make a phone call, as if I could hear the people sitting right next to me in the bar, much less some random friend.  Before I could do more than pull the phone out of its case, the two dudes sitting next to me demanded to see it and pelted me with questions as they experimented with the touch screen buttons.  Abruptly, the guy holding the phone stopped and gave me this weird, coy look and showed the phone to another guy, who started laughing.  I snatched it away and looked at the screen–they had touched the safari button and a google search page showed up.  It already had a search term in it, the stripper flick “Showgirls.”  I immediately remembered the drunken giggling from the Wednesday night out and knew this was the source.  I didn’t bother explaining that I hadn’t put the term in; quite frankly I was relieved that it hadn’t been anything less PG-rated.  Anyway, since I hadn’t met either of these guys before, it was a good way to break the ice, so thank you again, iPhone…funkyfresh

I had been pretty skeptical about all the iPhone hype and had no plans to get one until the mini screen on my Razr cracked down the middle.  I tried holding it together with scotch tape, but it a) looked super ghetto, and b) wasn’t working.  So I broke down and picked up an iPhone at the AT&T store this past weekend.

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I was surprised (and irritated) to discover that, unlike every other phone on the face of the planet, you can’t just switch your SIM card out of your old phone and into your new iPhone.  The guy told me I could download all my contacts from my Outlook contacts list, but whatever, I use Gmail and anyway, it’s a pain in the ass to type phone numbers into my phone, much less retype them into my computer.  So now I get to reenter all my phone numbers back into the iPhone.  I guess it’s a good excuse to weed out some numbers though, so perhaps some good will come out of it.

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Anyway, I bought the phone and took it home to register it.  To do this, I had to download iTunes, create an account, and then plug the iPhone into my computer to begin the registration process.  This seemed easy enough until I got to a screen that asked me if I wanted to search for an update.  I foolishly clicked on the “update” button, and a couple minutes later I started getting “fatal” error messages about the software on the iPhone.  The next popup screen advised me to click the “restore” button to restore my iPhone back to its factory settings.  Fighting down a wave of panic (which feels just like drinking too much cheap tequila), I clicked the button.  Not only did this not work, but my brand new iPhone went into figurative fetal position, frozen on a screen with a picture of the USB cable and the iTunes logo.

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Up until that very day I had been wondering if I should get rid of my land line.  With my cell phone number now attached to my catatonic iPhone, I was relieved to be able to pull out my trusty home phone and call iPhone tech support (and learned a valuable lesson about keeping a backup phone line).  It was maybe 8 at night by this point, and I was sure I would get an out-sourced techie from somewhere in South West Asia.  I was pretty frustrated, and not really in the mood to not understand the person I would be talking to, no matter how helpful and knowledgable he/she was, so I was incredibly surprised to be connected with “Candy” from Idaho.  She couldn’t have been much more than my age, if that, but she was very sympathetic and told me that I probably had a corrupted file on my CPU hard drive.

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So she had me remove all the iTunes related files from my programs list and reinstall iTunes.  Once that was done, I plugged my iPhone back in and was able to successfully restore the thing back to its factory settings.  It seemed like a lot of effort and frustration to go through for a cell phone, and I can only hope that the iPhone is worth the hassle.  So far, it’s pretty cool, and I’ll check back in with more thoughts and musings on the subject…

funkyfresh