Clearly, I need an iPhone. Or an iTouch. Or a GooglePhone. Whichever. It’s important to my future career as a Young Professional* that I be able to access important information with one gentle flick of the index finger, that I can read important manuscripts on the train (I’ll be in New York at this point, duh), and that I can listen to current, ironic\socially conscious hip-hop while I burn stress (and calories!) away at the gym.
The problem is (aside from lack of funds, since I’m sure this blog will start generating revenue soon, as promised by this video) that I’m afraid of buying something that is doomed to become outdated. This happened with my MacBook. At first, I loved it, and my friends were all really jealous and we took about ten thousand PhotoBooth pictures, and it was so fun. But then it got dirty really fast and something weird happened with its hard drive and its battery died so now it has to be plugged in at all times and therefore is for all practical purposes not even a laptop, so much as a Totally Annoying Thing That I Hate.
Still, when Bernadette Baker and Gretchen Stelter from Baker’s Mark came to talk to us about being rad literary agents (a very possible Future Career of mine), Gretchen had just gotten a Sony Reader and the general feeling seemed to be that soon important manuscripts will all be transported electronically, and you will be a total dud\fool if you don’t have some kind of device to read them on. But as cool as the Reader and the Kindle are, you can’t use them to watch your Pilates podcasts, and they don’t have apps. And Tom tells me that everybody’s going to be reading books on iPhones pretty soon, which reports from GBS about Google making its books available on iPhones and from the NY Times about Kindle books becoming accessible from “a wide range of phones,” both seem to confirm.
So,
1. Will future employers take me seriously if I buy an iPhone and program my ringtone to this YM song? (and yes, I am one of the mesmerizing young ladies singing vocals at the end of the track)
2. What is the most professional\enviable SmartPhone for a young, would-be publisher? If I use it to read, could I consider it a “textbook” and pay for it with my student loans?
3. Do I run risk, through this potential purchase, of becoming a GigaPet (my Number One Worst Fear), or, slightly worse, selling out the publishing industry by embracing new technology rather than continuing to champion actual, physical objects? Is it possible to appreciate old things and new things? Is it okay that sometimes I wish I had a TV\actual wireless internet that isn’t stolen from my neighbors, in order to watch House, MD in bed?
*(this is also an exciting career choice for me because I’ll finally be able to apply the fashion knowledge I’ve acquired from years of reading Lucky. Converting day-wear into evening-wear in 3 Easy Steps is kind of irrelevant when all of your clothes are actually pajamas.)
Yes. And no.
At one of the keynote speeches at the TOC conference, the speaker asked for a show of hands for people who had various different ebook reading devices, and probably a good 3/4 of the people there had iPhones, so I would say that nobody is going to call those unprofessional.
I am seriously considering picking one up, but it’s rough–I hate Apple. Or rather, I have realized that they hate me, and all the rest of their customers. They’re so ridiculously proprietary about software and hardware both. Take batteries, for example: how does it make any sense to design a phone or music player that you can’t change the battery on? “Oh, my battery died. Guess I better go buy a new iPhone” is just not cool, in my book.
So I’ll probably end up with a Google phone. I imagine the UI won’t be as clean as Apple’s, and it won’t be quite as elegant in form or have as many apps, but at least it will be an open source and non-proprietary product from a company I respect.
A similarly tech-saavy friend of mine just bought a GooglePhone (he was mortified, BTW, that I call it a “GooglePhone”), for the exact same reason. According to him, 1) it has a LOT of glitches, and 2) Not too many people have actually taken advantage of the opensource possibilities yet. Though the apps on Apple products do cost money, they’re pretty cheap, and it seems like people are more motivated to design them…