It’s funny how time flies when you have a 160GB iPod. After a couple of weeks of screwing around with video transcoding for the iPod Classic 160GB, I got bored. What else is there to do with 160GB?

Cram it with music.

The problem is what to do with all that music? I decided to rate the first few songs I listen to while falling asleep every night:

1 star: Delete this piece of shit (Alec Esotérica taught me this one ages ago)

2 stars: I don’t mind keeping it in the iPod but I am not too crazy about it either.

3 stars: I don’t mind listening to this song every few days.

4 stars: I like this song a lot. I don’t mind listening to this song once a day.

5 star: I absolutely love this song. I don’t care how many times I listen to it.

After a week or so I noticed that I am carrying a lot of crap in the 2-3 star range. Of the 30 GB or so of audio in the iPod, about 1.x GB was 5-star material, and the combined 4-and-5 star material was less than 3GB. Oops.

That was not the reason why I ditched the iPod Classic 160GB for an iPhone, but it made the decision a little bit easier (the hard decision is really “do I want to spend $400 on a frickin phone?”) for me. I returned the iPod, which nearly made me break even. I bought a second 8GB iPod for Ivette because to be honest I was getting tired of her whining about her piece of shit Nokia, and I wanted to get her hooked on texting.

Two days ago paranoia kicked in: AT&T is out to screw with me. I went to online account management to turn off the current data services on my family plan, plus also to cancel the insurance. To my delight, the grand total saved by killing the (now obsolete) insurance and data plans was $30. I also bumped my plan down to the next lower rung in the ladder, which was another $10, for a grand total of $40.

Adding my two iPhones to the account raised it back exactly $40 ($20 for each phone for unlimited data plus 200 SMS/month). The end result is that my monthly bill is pretty much the same, except I’ll have to buy Applecare sometime in the following year, and I have less rollover minutes. The rollover minutes sound like a great idea, but if you call mostly cell phones in the same provider, the rollover minutes are useless.

The purchase:

Going to my closest Apple Store was completely out of the god damn question. The store is in Tyson’s Corner, which was bound to be a mess. I decided to try the closest AT&T store, less than two miles from home. I spent close to an hour in the store, most of it in line. It seems every moron in Reston that had nothing better to do decided to go to the AT&T store to badger the three salespeople on duty.

I walked in to the counter, asked for two iPhones, grabbed two covers (one pink, one black, both sucked) and paid for the purchase. The salesman explained the return policy, then told me that due to some weird Apple policy, he had to seal my bag.

With just the two iPhones. No need to seal the two covers into the same bag.

I went back home, amazed that the actual purchase took less than 10 minutes.

Activation:

If you have an Apple ID, and you are replacing an AT&T phone with an iPhone, activation is pretty much idiot proof and takes maybe five minutes. I got the two phones activated in no time. I imagine it can be a problem for new customers, but at least AT&T allows you to pre-qualify the credit check part of the process, and then you can use some kind of token to bypass that step in the activation. Both phones were up and running immediately. I did not even need to switch the SIM card, each phone came with a fresh card.

First impression:

I talked to a friend earlier tonight and the best way I could describe the iPhone was: “OMFG.”

I have been following the iPhone since it launched, saw all the love and the hate and read hundreds of reviews. I did not test drive one, or even see one close, until a few minutes before the purchase.

It is much thinner than what I had expected, maybe the rounded edges help make it look thinner than what it really is. I had visualized it a bit taller. The black area of the front is almost the same width as a credit card, and almost an inch longer (go ahead and try it, it really is that close to that shape). It feels very dense, like a slab of pyrex or something like that.

The back of the device isn’t polished like a mirror, instead it has a very similar texture to the anodized aluminum shells in the Powerbook G4 and Mac Book Pro. The Apple logo in the back is now polished instead of a laser etching.

(unrelated side note, I just tried to use my fingers to do something in my Mac Book Pro’s screen)

So far I have used it for calls, visual voice mail, took a lot of pictures, surfed the web on both WiFi and Edge, and everything seems to be great. I’ll post more specific details later.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 12:38 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.