IN MY SHOES: “I Hate My iPhone”
In “The Medium,” her New York Times blog, Virginia Heffernan confesses that trading up from “my battered BlackBerry to the sweetie-pie iPhone” was a mistake. In this snippet, she describes trying to compose her first text message with the “$200 tile of technology”:
[A] text message arrived from a colleague, about breakfast. It came up in a little dialogue bubble, as if we were characters in a comic book.
Now I had to reply. My throat tightened. “Running late,” I decided on. “See you in 15 min.”
What came out was this: “Runninlate. See you in 15 Mon.”
Why? Why, because of course that’s what I typed! …
As I composed my running-late text, the iPhone’s iciness deepened my revulsion. Did this device, which was built never to be cradled, ever warm up? I was also mortified by my illiteracy. My right index finger - the only digit precise enough to hit the close-set virtual iPhone keys - seemed an anemic, cerebral thing, designed for making paltry points in debating club. I repeatedly stabbed to the right of my target letter. …
And so the iPhone made suggestions. Did I want to say Ride? Ripe? Ruin? No. I wanted to say Running. You know, the way a human might. But with its know-it-all suggestions, the iPhone seemed to want to be more human, more helpful, jollier than I was! The vaunted Apple user-friendliness was exposed, before my eyes, as bossiness and insincerity.
I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text - the work of a blithering idiot.
Heffernan ended up returning the iPhone, and getting a new BlackBerry.
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