dallas moore

I’ve had a cell service that has been adequate for my personal use for almost 10 years now. The only downside that I could see was that my initial phone, though lightweight and small, had extremely crappy reception. When the battery started dying, I began looking at a couple of choices.

I could buy a new battery for $45. That didn’t sound so awesome because of the reception. Plus, it just wasn’t a fun phone. Sure, it was a novelty at how small it was, but it also had a B&W screen and had begun looking very dated. My other choice was to upgrade to something newer/better. I also wanted something with a track record. I made the choice and upgraded to a Motorola RAZR. It was lightweight, had great reception, everyone around me seemed to have one. And at that particular time, I could renew my contract with my provider and get it for a mere $80. I didn’t worry about the renewal part. It was just a couple of years and my provider wasn’t bad. Mainly, I had solved a problem caused by a battery and actually caught up to everyone else’s cell phone tech. It just wasn’t an issue … at the moment.

Then Apple’s iPhone came along. It had, to me, ONE killer feature. It had easily used web browsing anywhere on an actual phone that I could see myself owning.

Let me repeat this because some people would go “Pfft! Web browsing … my phone does that”. It offered web browsing! Not some clunky text based variant squeezed into a regular cell phone. Not browsing a web page displayed adequately on some clunky/geeky hand held with a stylus or whatnot. This was a well displayed web-page, on a proven browser, with an easy interface, on a device I’d actually want to be seen holding and not embarrassed by appearing like the proverbial übergeek.

Luckily, I was stuck in my contract with an AT&T competitor and thus couldn’t swap over to the iPhone without a high buyout of over $800. Why “luckily“? The iPhone was not affordable, but the “cool factor” was just way too much in my irrational mind. $600 was not enough of a price barrier to stop me from getting it, but $1,400 was. If it were not for my contract keeping me from making the jump, I would have purchased the iPhone upon its first release and spent $599 on it in the process.

The big news for me today is that Apple is going to sell the new iPhone 8GB model for $199 ($299 for the 16GB). My contract obligations stopped me from buying the first generation iPhone. Now with the wait, I will not only get a newer/better version, but it will a cheaper, more highly developed version as well. It will have improved features now that Apple and 3rd party application developers have had time to tinker and mess around with the original. Now I get GPS and 3G. Things missing from the original.

I’m looking forward to late October. That’s going to be the moment when I can upgrade how my mind perceives the world with the capability of having the Internet anywhere. At that point, I think I’ll be able to catch up to the status quo again.