The iPhone 5: dream big!

---

Tatiana, one of my student employees, sent me a link to a YouTube video a few weeks ago.  “You have to see this,” she messaged.

 

 

I was as blown away as she was.

 

 

It it (if you’re too lazy to follow the link) a conceptual video of the features the iPhone 5 might have. In brief: as thin as a playing card. Able to display a virtual keyboard (which can be manipulated and enlarged) on the desktop below the phone. Able to display 3-D graphics.

 

 

This is delicious.

 

 

Now, I realize this is all pie-in-the-sky.  It’s a wish list.  Of course it is!  The technology isn’t there yet.

 

 

But you know what?  It will be. And sooner than you think.

 

 

As I’ve said before, I am no friend of Apple.  I was one of their biggest fans, back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Then they became provincial and unfriendly, and I realized that the PC world – broad and dull as it was – was the world of the future.

 

 

Well, here we are in 2012, and what do you know? The iPhone and the iPad are way ahead of the pack.

 

 

Believe me, I know.  I bought a Kobo Literati reader about a year ago. It was slow, unhappy, pathetic.  Then a B&N Nook (reconditioned): nicer, but unable to do a lot of stuff.

 

 

Then the office gifted me an iPad, and it was as if someone turned on the light in a very dark room.

 

 

The iPhone 5 video is laden with comments about how ridiculous it is: “maybe in 2050,” one of them snarks.

 

 

Listen, junior: a lifetime ago – in 1995 – we were just getting the Internet in our offices.  We didn’t know quite what it would do, but we were very excited.  I remember one of my officemates telling me that she’d actually logged into the Aer Lingus website! I ran over to see.  And it was –

 

 

A picture of an airplane.  And nothing more.

 

 

This is it? we said. This is what the Internet is all about?

 

 

Well, of course it wasn’t.   Seventeen years later, we’re streaming movies and TV directly to our mobile devices and our televisions. We’re shopping online.  We’re doing everything online.

 

 

And these stupid commentators think that it will take another forty years to achieve a few more advances? 

 

 

I don’t think so.

 

 

We must be good at this evolution stuff.  We do it so fast.

---

 

All my (useless) gadgets

---

I have a box – no, two boxes – of cords and connections belonging to various computing devices. 

 

 

The devices themselves are long gone.

 

 

How does this happen?

 

 

Last year I bought a cheap ($40) Kobo Literati e-reader at Bed Bath & Beyond.  I liked it, but it was slow and balky.  Barnes & Noble had an online sale for reconditioned Nooks, so I bought one ($80), and loved it, until it started acting wonky.  Then, a few months ago, my office granted me an iPad, and the Nook joined the Literati on the unused-gadget shelf.

 

 

Goodbye and good luck, my one hundred and twenty dollars.

 

 

I’ve always been very conscientious about backing up my computer. Some years ago I heard of this great new backup system: the Jazz drive.  I bought one on eBay, for maybe $40, and a bunch of Jazz disks (which are like cassettes on steroids) for maybe $25.  I used it probably four times.  It was clunky and noisy and difficult to set up.  I now own a smooth little candy-bar sized storage device that plugs into my laptop with a USB connection, and which slurps up all my data effortlessly.

 

 

Another sixty-five bucks down the tube.

 

 

I could go on forever.  I am too cheap to buy a proper iPod, so I have purchased at least three cheap imitations, none of which works right, total cost (estimated) sixty bucks.  Then there was the reconditioned laptop, which was wonderful and lasted for about a year, until it actually had a nervous breakdown, complete with beeping and booping sound effects.  Two hundred dollars down the drain.  (Moral, if you haven’t been keeping track: don’t buy reconditioned items.)  The next laptop lasted quite a while – four years, maybe – but it became painfully slow and difficult to use during its last year of active service.  It was around four hundred bucks, I think.

 

 

(My current Dell Inspiron laptop also cost around four hundred bucks; I think I bought it in early 2009, and it is going strong almost three years later.  It has some quirks – it often refuses to recharge its battery – but it is light and easy to use, and I am partial to it.  I had a whirlwind love affair with the iPad when I first got it a few months ago, but – as someone online wisely stated not long ago – the iPad is not a laptop.  Laptops are far more powerful and speedier, and much easier to use for word processing (it is not pleasant to type on a smooth glass surface).  I just bought one of those fancy iPad cases with a built-in Bluetooth keyboard, which makes it a bit nicer to use, but iPads are mostly for travel, I think: it was a godsend on our last two trips, to Orlando and to Cape Cod.  At home, my laptop is (as Eloise said of Nanny) my mostly companion.

 

 

But I still visualize all that money flown out the window, for all those lovely glittering gadgets I bought, thinking they would change my life. 

 

 

A few of them did. 

 

 

But I should have chosen more carefully. 

 

 

Let’s face it.  I’m an idiot.

---

 

E-readers

 

---

I bought an e-reader a few weeks ago, It's a Literati, made by Sharper Image.  I bought it at Bed Bath & Beyond, on seventy-five percent markdown.  (Is Sharper Image going out of business?  Is Bed Bath & Beyond?)

 

 

It came preloaded with TWENTY-FIVE CLASSICS! “Huckleberry Finn.”  “Moby-Dick.”  “Pride and Prejudice.”  (Not really things I hunger to reread.)  And an offer for as many more public-domain classics as I want: “On the Origin of Species.”  “Tom Sawyer.”  (Big on Mark Twain, aren't they?)  Also “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “Grimm's Fairy Tales,” which are more down my alley.

 

 

I can see why it was discounted.  It's slow.  It takes a long time to jump from chapter to chapter.  The battery runs down quickly.  It can't jump to familiar passages, or even to a particular page.

 

 

But I like it. 

 

 

I’ve been reluctant to buy one before.  I was afraid that it’d be just one more technotoy to play with and discard.  Now, however, I’m sold on the concept.

 

 

I've been loading it up with free stuff from Project Gutenberg.  If you don't know the site, go check it out.  (Also, send them some money.)  They have tons of stuff.  James Joyce (Gutenberg has everything but “Finnegans Wake,” damn it).  “Palgrave's Golden Treasury.”  “Fathers and Sons.”  “Anna Karenina.”  “A Hero of Our Time.”  (Russian classics rule, right?)   Dryden.  Dickens.  L. Frank Baum.  Woolf.   Verlaine.   Dante.  Andrew Lang.  Confucius, and Mencius, and the Koran, and the Apocrypha, and the Rig Veda.  I’ve got almost four hundred books in it so far, and it’s barely half-full. 

 

 

I still like real paper-and-ink books.  I have a whole roomful of them, so evidently I must think they’re okay.  But I like to travel with reading material, which (as any reader will tell you) can be pretty tedious, especially for long trips, and especially if (like me) you like to read a little of this and a little of that.  The e-reader solves this problem very elegantly.  I can skip from President Grant’s autobiography to the Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya Sutra to “The Phoenix and the Turtle” at my whim.  It’s also ideal for bedtime, as it doesn’t weigh a ton and won’t conk me in the head if I fall asleep while reading it (as has happened more than once with Thomas Pynchon novels and forty-pound histories of the Thirty Years War).

 

 

It’s just big enough to whap someone in the back of the head with, too, just like a real book.

 

 

I am now prepared for any reading emergency.

 

 

Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, anyone?

 

 

 

---

 

 

Nook vs. book

---

 

I'm doing my holiday shopping as I always do: watching for some little adorable thing for myself. What fun is gift-shopping if you don't buy yourself a little something along the way?

 

I had thought that this might be the year to give myself an e-reader. Imagine carrying a whole library around with you! I've researched them enough to know some of the differences (WiFi / 3G / 4G) and pitfalls (difficult to read in sunlight, mostly black-and-white screens, illustrations sometimes not so great). A nice lady at the mall let me play with the Nook a few months ago, and I liked the look and feel of it very much. And the price is almost right: the basic Kindle is $139, the Nook only slightly more than that, and you can get off-brand readers for under $100.

 

But I was mooching along downtown on Saturday, with a paperback copy of Tim Robinson's “Connemara” under my arm, and it suddenly hit me: what benefit would an e-reader bring me?  It'd weigh the same as my little book. It would serve the same purpose. I bought my copy of “Connemara” for $9.99 from Daedalus Books Online; I could have downloaded the Kindle edition for about the same, so price is a wash. I can write in my book, and tear the endpapers out to make notes, and use it as a coaster; I wouldn't do any of those things with an e-reader (I think some e-readers let you make notes, but surely not with the hectic casualness I scribble in a book). E-readers have batteries that need to be charged up; my little copy of “Connemara” will probably outlive me, sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere, and it will never need to be charged up at all.

 

It'd be great, of course, to have a hundred books to read in one package.  Maybe if I were on a long trip, I suppose.  But did I need a hundred books for my Saturday stroll? If I'd had an e-reader, would I have turned from "Connemara" to “Troilus and Cressida,” or “Gravity's Rainbow,” or the Apocrypha, or Emily Dickinson? Maybe. But I spent the day musing over Robinson. He's a little tedious on the surface – so much detail! so many names! – but he builds up his text by accretion, one stone on top of another. He benefits from quiet attentive reading.

 

So I think maybe I will not buy an e-reader this year. Once they've integrated the e-reader with one or two other things – maybe an MP3 player and a phone and a camera – and brought the price down to the same point, they'll convert me. But not until then.

 

Now what am I supposed to buy myself for a present?

 

---