On Friday morning last week, I got up bright and early, like I do every day. Except today was different. I took the day off work. Instead of waiting for the bus in front of my apartment building, I went down the block and got on a different bus. One that took me over to my local At&t where, 11 days prior, I had paid for my new cell phone!
My new cell phone is the fancy iPhone 3GS, which At&t had opened its doors early for. I was 5th in line when I arrived and 40 minutes later, I walked out of the door with my new phone.
For the last 2 1/2 years, I've been using the 8525. After careful research and comparisons which I blogged about here (Jan 23rd, 2007) and here (Feb 5th, 2007), I bought this phone because it could do Japanese and was compatible with Japan's cellular signals.
This was the first cellphone and cellphone contract I've ever done! I was excited and had a lot of fun with it... at first. But as time went on, the 8525 degraded and felt apart like a cheap pencil. These days, I can't hold a conversation longer than 1.5 hours without the fully charged battery dying. Windows Mobile 5 crashes all the damn time. And it is very slow when doing the simplest of Internet tasks.
Ever since my contract had run its 2 year course, I could not wait to get rid of that piece of shit. We had some good times, but some things in life just aren't meant to last. We all knew that the 3rd generation iPhone was coming out sometime this Summer. So, I was patient. I needed only to wait. And 2 weeks ago, Apple finally announced that it would coming the Friday after next.
Friday finally arrived, and with it brought my iPhone. That general fancy-gadget excitement had returned! I felt just as anxious and optimistic when I first got my 8525. Not only do I have a fancy new phone, but I actually have an iPod now. All these years, I've still been buying and using CDs like a caveman. In fact, the reason I've been slacking off on blogging again was because I spent last week ripping all my CDs and importing them in iTunes. I was preparing!
After my first 5 days with this thing, I love it. It blows my previous phone out of the water and does so much more. Much like when I first got the 8525, I feel like I'm carrying around a little personal computer. Most everything I do on the Internet, can be done on the iPhone. So if I'm away for the weekend, I can easily keep up with News or whatever without clunking around my laptop.
The iPhone isn't the only fancy phone on the market these days. Palm released its Palm Pre about a month ago. The Palm Pre is a little amazing piece of technology of its own. It's every bit good as the iPhone... except there is one thing that the Palm Pre absolutely does not have.
Thanks to the overwhelming market share, the iPhone has started becoming a contender in the game market. Game Developers are actually starting to take it seriously, to an extent. The larger developer studios mostly see it as a quick way to make some money, like with Metal Gear Solid Touch and I Love Katamari.
But some PC studios have released their full fledged games on the iPhone, like Gameloft with Oregon Trail and Popcap Games with Peggle and a few others.
Not only that, but in the next few months, we'll see the release of the Dexter iPhone game. Which will be the first "high" budget, full-fledged released iPhone game. In the game, you carefully stalk your victims, building a case as to why they should killed. You justify their murders, kidnap them, and justify your decision to their face. If you correctly uphold the law of Harry, and don't get caught or let your guard down, you win.
The Dexter iPhone game had an impressive showing at E3 where many journalists compared it to the Phoenix Wright series on the DS. That should come out in July.
But anyways, I've been having a great time with the games I have so far. Here are the games I've bought so far.
The reason I started off with these games was that I wanted to see what established console and PC developers were trying to do with the iPhone. Especially games like Metal Gear and Katamari, which are games that really have no business of being on the iPhone.
Also, these games are the reason I've been slacking off on blogging for this week so far.