There is a guy that rides the train every morning that has a segway and literally parks it at the station chained up and leaves it there. It hasn’t been stolen yet either. I don’t know what he does for a living but he loves his gadgets. I ended up sitting next to him this morning because the train was so crowded and all the seats had 2 people. I couldn’t help but notice that he had his iphone with him and today’s Chicago Tribune.
He sat down and immediately began playing with the iPhone. He was jamming along to Madonna and a variety of other songs (yes it was that loud) as he checked what looked like news and rss feeds and email. I was trying not to stare but that little iPhone is neat and I was curious about what it could do. Anyway, I went back to my TIME magazine and tried not to think how cool it would be to be reading an iPhone rather than my print copy of TIME.
I did notice though that although he had a home subscription to the Chicago Tribune and intended to read it, but he never did. Once he pulled it up like he was going to start and then the song ended and he grabbed his phone out of his pocket again. In the 30 minute ride he didn’t get any newspaper reading in. And I feel like newspapers have a new competitor now. They don’t just have to worry about web sites replacing their paper as a news source at home, they have to worry about mobile smart phones replacing it as a source to get news in a place you can’t be on a computer. I am not sure they know about it yet but the Trib’s job just got a lot harder.
Anyway my 3 years with my treo will be up in April and I should start looking at new phones since around that time frame they always tend to break. I would like the iPhone but it is SO expensive!! $600 bucks is a lot of money. They may have brought it down to $400 now, but still I have never paid more than $200 for a phone and I thought that was a lot. I have an ipod and I can’t believe that it hasn’t been broken or stolen yet too. I got some of the ipod accessories so I could always have it in it’s case with me and have a battery pack in case the battery runs out but it is nothing compared to how cool the iPhone is because it doesn’t have internet. Somehow Apple keeps making such elegant and swish gadgets that you want to buy new ones even though the old ones are still working. I guess that is their secret to the success.