Hi world, you usually don’t to hear from me, but after being seen at a conference with my new phone, there is a need to set the record straight. In the past I may have said some bad things about the iPhone calling it the “shiny iPhone of uselessness” and labeled it “inferior to my AT&T smartphone“, but … you know … times change … and sometimes a girl can change her mind. Sure the iPhone has its limitations, like no keyboard, but the browsing is unmatched. What good is a keyboard on phone with sub standard display? If you’re thinking about it … it’s OK … come over to the iPhone side we’ll get thru this together …

Ahem. Hey all. It’s Vanessa, taking back my blog. It may in fact be true that more than one person came up to me at SES and said they noticed I had an iPhone. It’s possible someone brought up last year’s SES San Jose when I was photographed in an anti-iPhone competition. And it’s also possible that I talked Michael Gray down from the iPhone ledge last year in a long rant about form vs. function and substance vs. flash. (It’s possible that someone took over my blog to let everyone know the iPhone truth.)

Convergence. And Urbanspoon
I think what finally sold me was the promise of convergence. And the Urban Spoon app. And the addition of 3G.

Pretty doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t work
The iPhone isn’t perfect. It crashes a lot (although less often than my Windows Mobile phone). I downloaded the update, so hopefully that will get better. I’m considering bringing my phone back to an Apple store actually to see if I can swap it for another one, in case mine is extra wonky. It seems to drop calls and freeze far more often than the iPhones of other people I talk to. 5 dropped calls in 15 minutes with full signal strength is a bit much, right?

And almost as irritating are the times when I’m using Google maps when completely lost only to have the maps application crash. Because then I’m just more lost. The other day, I had the added frustration of being lost, being on the phone trying to get directions, and using Google maps, only to have the call drop over and over and the maps app crash again and again. Perhaps Apple is just telling me not to travel.

Application ecosystem
But the iPhone also has a lot to like. It’s easy to install applications, which means there may be some mass adoption, so app developers make money, which could spark the ecosystem and cause more apps to be developed.

I think Apple could be hindering app development by being such a black box though. If too many apps get pulled without explanation, then developers may not want to risk spending resources creating applications they aren’t sure will stay up. Will developers abandon the iPhone platform for Google’s Android once it’s available since Android doesn’t seem to have that risk? Only if the Android phone and supported apps get similar adoption as the iPhone. And I’m just not so sure about that.

The best apps to try, according to Twitter
Speaking of iPhone apps, I twittered the other day asking about people’s favorites. Here are the winners of that very unscientific poll.

• The aformentioned Urban Spoon app: The basic idea is that you shake the phone and the wheels spin and the phone tells you where to eat. Which is cool enough, because how much of our lives are spent trying to figure that out. But you can also lock down one or two of the three options (neighborhood, food type, or price) for more granular choices, and from there, you can get to a restaurant profile that tells you the overall rating, see reviews (both critics and users) and get location and contact information. Just as cool is the “near me” feature, which doesn’t include spinning wheels, but when you’re walking down the street or staying in a hotel with non-existent room service, and you’re really hungry, you can just choose “near me” and it will list what’s available based on your GPS location. Which is way better than wandering aimlessly.
• Facebook: @detlev said he liked Facebook on the iPhone better than in a regular browser. I agree — it’s much more streamlined and not so cluttered.
• Twitter apps: Several people mentioned different Twitter apps they like. I’ve been using Twinkle, but lately I’ve realized it doesn’t show me the latest updates. I’ll get one person’s latest, and then nothing for days. @stewtopia mentioned Twitteriffic, so I might try that next.
• @jasoncrawford suggested Whrrl, which I’m going to check out.
• @nathanbuggia said he likes Dobot Todos, which I had never heard of, and who could use a bit of search strategy help. He’s also a fan of the NY Times app, and the Labyrinth game.
• jheitzeb suggested the White Pages app, which I have used a few times and find to be very slick.
• @natala likes Brain Challenge, although sadly, it crashes my phone, so I can’t try it out.
• @kristyann likes Shazam, which tells you what music you’re listening to. Several people were raving about Shazam at SES San Jose, so I downloaded it to see what I was missing. I like the idea of making a list of songs to buy on iTunes later. Although shouldn’t you be able to buy them at the time? Since you are on the iPhone already after all.
• @andruedwards suggested OmniFocus, but as it’s not free, I need to figure out exactly what it gets me over free organizational software before I take the plunge. I do need better task management, so maybe this is what I need.
• teampoop mentioned Guitar Toolkit, although I think you have to be a guitar player to appreciate it.

But back to the reason for this blog post. Michael Gray wanted to out my hypocritical iPhone ways. (And I came clean in a WebProNews interview the other day!). And according to his Twitter feed today, he’s trying to sync his calendar and contacts to something that just might be Apple-powered. And then I got this suspicious email from him:

“I use Urbanspoon to keep track of my most and least favorite restaurants. If you use Urbanspoon too we can compare notes on the best places to eat.”

Urbanspoon has apparently won him over too. Apple should start sending them royalty checks.

So when my new Vista-esque Sony laptop with the fantastic screen and the DVD-only mode turned out to be a string of salesperson-uttered broken promises, deathly blue screens, and unexpected shut downs, I considered it to be a normal, operational computer. When the shift and control keys stopped working, I didn’t bat an eyelash and simply remapped them to function keys. So I had to train my fingers to move up rather than sideways for capital letters and copy and paste. This is the way of Windows. But when the k key and the 0 key and the l key randomly stopped working… well, that started to get in the way of my productivity. Then 10 minutes it took to get out of sleep mode didn’t help either. Nor did the USB ports that only worked when they decided the air was exactly the same temperature.

I broke down and called Sony. After the requisite half hour hold, I talked to someone who said they’d be happy to have me send the laptop back so they could check it out. And if they decided the problem was under warranty, they would fix it and send it back. How long would that take? About 14 days.

Let me interrupt my sad, sad story to revisit what I said before. I know this is how their warranty works and Sony is delivering exactly the service is promised. And it’s easy to say that consumers are dumb not to read these things and know what they are getting into. But I don’t know that consumers are stupid.

Instead, I think that consumers enter into a kind of contract with a company during a purchase. I pay money in exchange for a reasonable expectation that the thing I’m buying will actually work. We don’t put a great deal of emphasis on the “what if something goes wrong” part of the deal because if we expected the item not to work, we likely wouldn’t buy it in the first place.

But my laptop didn’t work and it’s my only working computer right now. How do you think I would do without a computer for 14 days? Right, I may as well go without coffee. Or the air.

I asked the nice Sony rep if any options were available that would enable me to exchange the non-functioning laptop for a functioning one. He said I could call customer care and they would help me with that. Great! I called the number. And listened to lots of ads for Sony products.

Tip #1 for phone support: don’t try to sell things to people who have problems with your product and are patiently waiting on hold for help. This happens to me all the time and I cannot imagine a scenario in which the person finally reaches a real person and says “well, I was originally calling because this thing you sold me doesn’t work, but forget all that. Now I’d like to buy more stuff from you!”

I finally got through to a person who said I had called the online sales number and she could only help me with purchases directly from them. Well, I bought the laptop at Fry’s. I had to return it to them, then. I had tried that and they said they had a 15 day return policy; after that, I had to call Sony. She helpfully gave me the first Sony number I had called. I explained that I had already talked to them, so perhaps there was another number I could call? Nope, that was the number.

Tip #2: Educate the employees who answer the phone. A customer with a problem isn’t likely to be made super happy by waiting on hold a half hour, only to be caught up in Dante’s seventh circle of phone scavenger hunt hell.

She eventually transferred me back to the original tech support line. I talked to an amazingly unhelpful person who explained about the warranty and how the whole send back for 14 days thing is in writing. I completely understand it’s in writing. I get that they are doing exactly as they promised. But they sold me a laptop that clearly doesn’t work and some amount of working with me might have caused me to write a blog post about how Sony confidently backs up its products and supports its customers and goes beyond what they have to in customer service rather than writing, well, this blog post and quoting forum posts like this one that I perhaps will link to with anchor text from the title of the thread: don’t buy a Sony Viao–

They will not even lend me a replacement because it did not fail within 2 weeks. 2 weeks? Is that all that they can comfortably commit too?
This has made me rethink my policy of buying Sony for its reliabilty and quality. I accept that things can go wrong but the first rule that I instill with my team is that the complaint must be dealt with promptly and resolved a quickly as possible.
Clearly Sony do not subscribe to this principle.

So what’s a girl to do. I sadly have two other laptops — one with a broken screen and one that randomly shuts off every few minutes. Apparently, I’m a poor steward of technology. I figured I’d better get yet another laptop, and I’d better do it fast. I could get a cheap PC, but those don’t seem to have a great track record with me and besides, I’ll send the Sony off for its 14 day tour and get it back fixed, so I don’t really need yet another Windows laptop.

I know. I can barely bring myself to type it. Me, the champion against all that is unholy and wrong about Apple holding the world prisoner with its shiny, shiny lure of nonfunctionality. That same me walked into an Apple store and exchanged large piles of money for a Macbook Pro.

In my defense: not only is the Macbook Pro very very pretty, but all I had to do was take it out of the box and turn it on and I was online in about 15 seconds, as I admitted recently when I was a guest on SEO Rockstars.

I’ve now had the Mac for a couple of weeks and while it’s not the perfect utopian paradise, with frolicking, scantily clad fairies, unlimited lattes, and showering gold that one is led to believe — it does occasionally freeze or not understand that a full signal wireless connection means I should be able to get on the internet — it’s BILLIONS of times better than my Sony laptop of doom. One forgets how much easier it is to get things done when one isn’t restarting from the blue screen of shattered dreams and unsaved documents every ten minutes.

The biggest drawback of the Mac is that I know absolutely nothing about it. Give me a PC and I’ll fine-tune your registry settings, reinstall your drivers, and work from the command line. Give me a Mac and I’ll… well, I’ve almost figured out how to launch applications. I’m going to use bootcamp to install XP on a partition (although someone on Twitter suggested vmware fusion or virtualbox instead), but I’m going to keep the Mac OS too and see if I can figure out how to do more than just gaze at it longingly.

Will I become one of those crazy, hippie Apple-loving fanatics who likes Apple just a little too much and who smugly tells everyone I “think different” with no ironic nod to that phrase’s grammatical incorrectness? Will I trade in my bursting-with-function Smartphone for the shiny iPhone of uselessless?

In the unlikely event of such distruption in the natural order of the universe, I give you all license to remind me of my English degree and smack me in the head with one of my many nonfunctioning iPods.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way and everyone on the internet has abandoned this blog to look for more iPhone posts in a frantic rush of mice and keys like those people in that It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World movie — the first one, not the remake, which was mostly kind of lame and didn’t have exactly the kind of trampling and stampeding I’m thinking of. The remake was more iToaster-level stampede. Although it did have Seth Green in it. But he doesn’t always make the best movie choices. He went from The Italian Job to Without a Paddle? Really? But I feel as though I’m getting way off track here.

The iPod is this magical device of song and love, with its scroll wheel and portability and proprietary file formats. We all have them. I now have three. But why do we all have them? What is it that makes us compulsively continue to buy these crappy disposable devices that die without warning, use software that crashes our computers, and cause us to spend hours lighting candles to the gods of musical electronic equipment, praying our iPod will one day work again? Does Apple send crack through those hip white headphones?

Other music players exist. Why don’t any of us buy those?

A couple of years ago, I got a 40 gig iPod. One day, it inexplicably stopped working. Big exclamation mark: blue screen of death, apple-style. What the hell was up with that? I can hear you already. It’s several years old. Why am I complaining? Which is proof you’ve soaked in too much of that apple crack. Would you say that if your two-year old washing machine stopped working? Or your TV? (OK, you’d like the excuse to go buy a new TV, since two years of TV time is like the difference between a 12″ black and white with rabbit ears and a technicolor wide screen, but still. You might whine a little.)

Of course, when I did a search, I found lots of articles about what to do about this problem. Anti-Apple sites with crafting instructions on how to turn your useless iPod into a nice paperweight or doorstop? Amazingly, no. All the sites meticulously detail how to restore the iPod, with tips and tricks. Lovingly caress the iPod and talk to it softly! It might just feel taken for granted! Knit it an iPod cozy! I’m surprised it’s not called the “iPod exclamation point of life” or something.

Anyway. I followed all the instructions and everything worked for a while. And then the iPod died again. And again. And I got really tired of knitting cozies. I’m not even that good at knitting. So, I gave up and stopped listening to music. You might find this approach to be extreme, but I was really busy and the music had to pay the price.

And then I was given a shuffle, and I finally could once again listen to Britney at the gym again. All was well with the world. (I suppose how much you agree with that statement depends on your perspective on pop songs sung by barefoot, red bull-drinking, Lindsay Lohan BFFs. But the important thing is that I my workouts now had a soundtrack.)

The shuffle is great, but it’s fairly limited. You can’t keep all your songs on it and if you want to listen to something in particular, you have to keep pressing that skip button again and again and again and… dammit, where’s that song already!

I recently took a long drive in a car with no radio, and blessed the Apple gods when I found that my iPod had miraculously come to life. And then I cursed Apple for turning me from a person who expected consumer goods to work properly into someone who was grateful when they did.

But of course, the iPod joy was shortlived. It got me nearly the whole drive, but eventually decided to try something new. No exclamation point, but it would play a few seconds of a song, then freeze, then eventually skip to the next song, play a few seconds, freeze… Like an evil music preview mode with less preview and more maddening irritation.

Yes, I’m sure if I did a search, I would find an array of sites explaining just the right soothing tone to use when coaxing the iPod back to life. You see, this particular behavior means that it could tell you weren’t using authentic iPod headphones and it was upset by the non-approved, differently colored replacements. Or you know, whatever causes evil skip mode. But I was done. The iPod and I were going our separate ways.

So what did I do? And here’s the very worst part of all.

I bought another iPod.

Apple syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome but with more gadgetry.

I went into the Apple store. Shuffles, nanos, video iPods… I asked someone where the regular iPods were. The store employees were apalled to find a person who was not fully up-to-date on Apple inventory. Did I live in a cave? There are no more “regular” iPods. There are video iPods. There are nanos. There are shuffles. Which do I want? I said that I wouldn’t need anything if my iPod hadn’t decided to die, but since they are disposable and all, what can you do. The guy looked at me like I was crazy. (And obviously, that I wasn’t buying one of the many other music players available proves that I am.) What was I talking about? No, he had never heard of iPods that stopped working.

Maybe I had Apple syndrome, but that guy had drunk just a little too much of that tasty Apple kool-aid and I’m suspicious that someone snuck in and added a little vodka to the punch bowl when the teachers weren’t looking.

So, I gave in and bought an 80 gig video iPod. It was shiny and bright and would make all my dreams come true. Of course, it came with no software and no charger but I would take my box of incompleteness and like it! Seriously, I would have liked to have downloaded my songs without needing internet access because as it happened, I didn’t have internet access where I was staying (I know! The world has gone mad!) other than from my phone and downloading iTunes with a phone-powered connection isn’t as fun as you might think, especially when it disconnects minutes before finishing and you have to start again. But I soldiered through.

And eventually, I even had music, just in time for the return drive. Oh Apple, I love you again with your musical sweetness and auxiliary connection to my speakers.

BUT THEN THE IPOD FROZE.

It’s two days old. It wasn’t cheap. And already it’s a doorstop. I was driving, but found a place to pull over that had a signal for my phone and I was off searching again. Turns out that if my iPod freezes, all I have to do is hold down the menu button and the center circle button until the Apple logo shows up. Well of course I do! Why didn’t I think of that! I have a better idea, Apple. How about make it so that the iPod doesn’t feeze. Just a thought. You know, toss it around and see what you think.

So now everyone is out buying iPhones and as someone who has just handed over money for more Apple non-functionality, I completely understand. But I do have some advice. It’s the menu and center circle buttons that you hold down. And you should start learning how to knit now. Practice on sleeves for whatever actual working phone you are chucking the iPhone for. I hear the iPhone doesn’t take kindly to poorly knitted covers.

My iPod includes the following:

• Britney Spears
• NSync (and also JC Chasez’s solo album, but none of Justin’s)
• Nick Carter (but not those whiny Backstreet Boys)

I can explain.

Sort of.

See, it’s like this. Profound and thoughtful music is great, but not so much when you’re on the elliptical at the gym, attempting to go somewhat faster than the pace of the slowest snail ever to creep its way under the slowest flower in the slowest garden. (I know, the slow garden thing makes no sense. Just go with me here. I’m abusing metaphors.) You need peppy music. And please God, not music that makes you think. Or makes you depressed, so that all you want to do is go cry in a corner. No crying in gymage! Or something.

Sometimes Britney is just the thing.

I haven’t been listening to Brit or the boys as much lately though, as my iPod has sadly, once again, stopped working. All I get is the folder with the excited exclamation point. Why is the folder so exclaimy? It’s not actually saying anything except “I don’t work! Woo! You get no music! None!” So, instead of speeding along as NSync wonders if you’d still love them if they weren’t, you know, rich and famous and all that (I guess they’ve learned the answer to that!), I have been using my blackberry to catch up on email while I climb endless flights of non-existent stairs. Because of my iPod’s stubborn refusal to give me music, I have crossed the geek line and have become someone who even the every-three-minute twitterers can mock.

On the plus side, I’m making a tiny dent in my email. Those who know me are aware of my massive failure to keep up on email. Friends have seen my inbox and have honestly gasped in horror and absolute astonishment. I suppose I should thank Apple for giving me a way to get a bit closer to catching up. (I feel I should mention that I used to read while on the elliptical. Actual books! Not just electronic devices! I wasn’t always this geeky!)

I don’t always do email at the gym. Sometimes, I’m being endlessly tortured by Frank. Frank is my personal trainer. I used to mock the idea of a personal trainer. I figured I could work out just as easily without paying someone lots of money to stand around and yell at me. But I was oh so very wrong. Apparently the standing around and yelling makes a really big difference. I can tell this because of the substantially increased amount of pain that I feel after working out with him compared to the days I work out by myself. Typical exchange:

Me: OK, that’s enough. I can’t do anymore. I’m going to die.
Frank: Ha ha. You’re not done. Keep going.
Me: No seriously. I’m going to throw up now.
Frank: I’ll go get you a bucket.

It’s a good time.

But back to my confession. It’s possible that every so often, I even listen to some of these songs outside of the gym. Like maybe the car. Possibly I’ve sung along. But I’m not confessing everything. Some secrets are just too dark to share.