Boys Love Toys

I love gadgets and as such, I'm constantly switching cell phones. It was pointed out to me that in the past year, I've used 3 different phones, none of them cheap. But the mother of all phones, the iPhone, is going to be coming out next month and looking at the pictures, it leaves me drooling.

Plus, this bad boy is only available on Cingular, the provider that I use and currently my contract is up for renewal, which means I'm able to get a new phone. Hello, my pretty...

For those in China, you may not be used to the US mobile phone market where everything has to be done through providers and choice is severely limited. You have choices between 5 or so service providers and then, on top of that, the choice of 6-10 different phones, of which 3 or 4 are the same no matter the provider and many of them are cheap and crappy. Ultimately, everyone basically uses the same phone, something I attempt to buck by getting my phone in China. Unfortunately, my beloved Nokia 8800 is now going haywire.

The problem is, unlike in China, there aren't Nokia service centers all over the place and thus, I basically have a very expensive, beautiful, and useless phone that can't be fixed in the US. Anyways, in China (and Asia as a whole), one's mobile often is meant as more than just a phone, but an attempt to grasp for individuality, decorating it with covers, different wallpapers, ring tones, and trying to get a unique (and thus expensive) phone. In the US, for the majority of people, a mobile phone is wholly utilaterian.

The iPhone is the most desired phone around and I'd imagine its going to become almost as ubequitous as the iPod is now. This part discourages me about it, as well as the fact its brand new, so will probably have more than a few bugs which will slowly be revised. I'm also more than a little concerned about its lack of any regular buttons. The "buttons" will appear on the phone's touch screen. This isn't a big issue for making a phone call, but as someone who sends a lot of text messages, I'm very, very concerned about this element. Obviously, the big plus side is the coolness factor and the (likely) extreme ease of synching the phone with my Mac computer. Ultimately, the price will be the biggest issue in my current jobless and financially challenged state. I just hope its $400+ and will thus totally discourage me from purchasing it, though I'm guessing with an extended contract, it will probably be around $300 (or am I just dreaming?).