haven’t had good experiences with PDAs and smartphones. The Treo 650, for instance, was a nightmare when it came to bulk, reception, and sound quality. And gradually the idea of hunkering down over a tiny glowing screen with a stylus seemed less and less cool. A friend reminded me, “You work in an office—you should want to spend less time at the computer, not more.” So I bought the simplest clamshell I could, resisted the temptations of the Crackberry, and felt liberated from my gadget obsession.
Then the iPhone ad campaign began. I admitted to myself I was curious, but I reminded myself how much I hated smartphones and tiny screens. I had trouble believing that any touch screen could be genuinely comfortable. I’ll go see a floor model, I thought, and that will be that.
Of course, that’s like an alcoholic walking into a bar to look at a “floor model” of the latest brand of vodka. Once a gadget freak, always a gadget freak. I went to my local AT&T/Cingular store after work—after the lines had died down and the mobs had left it looking like the remnants of a party: dirty floors, disorder, and a significant number of stragglers snapping up the final stock. I asked myself if I wanted to be one of these people. One guy received his new iPhone over the counter with a classic air of paranoid covetousness—like Gollum possessive over his precious (and it should go without saying that there is significant overlap between tech early adopters and Lord of the Rings devotees). The staff had long since run out of the decorative gift bags.
