Over the last couple months I came to the realization that I couldn’t continue intermittently sharing my son’s cell phone. He is going into the Army next month and will need his own phone and with our increased community volunteer work I need a phone of my own. After realizing I could no longer be cell phone free, the next logical decision was: what phone to buy?

I did what most techies do these days and twittered the question: what cell phone would you buy?

The most common response, of course, was the one phone I least wanted to buy: the iPhone. It wasn’t that I disliked Apple or the iPhone – I’ve owned a Mac for several years now and consider myself platform agnostic – plus the iPhone has looked like a sweet gadget from the get go. I also haven’t been swayed by the ditch the iPhone crowd although will admit these are some compelling reasons to stay away. Then again, when others zig, I tend to zag. Just my style. And I like most of Wayne Sutton’s reasons for sticking with the iPhone (question: what are you using for iPhone screenshots?).

My biggest hurdle has been getting over the company Apple partnered with to deliver the service: AT&T. I really, really, really dislike AT&T but realized that was based on too many things to get into that matter any more. Sometimes it’s best to leave the past in, well, the past.

Real world iPhone usefulness

So I kept coming back to the iPhone in my search for a phone which did everything I wanted to do and more:

• be an easy to use phone
• allow me store ample number of contacts
• decent digital camera so that I could stop carrying around two devices
• would store and play a reasonable amount of music in MP3 format (didn’t have to be our entire music libary, but needed to have at least 10GB of our favorite MP3)
• could take place of my aging Pocket PC and store all my online passwords
• GPS that might replace Garmin which needs map updates
• could be that magical *one* gadget to carry (almost) everywhere

It began with us heading off to the Apple store at the Southcenter Mall just south of Seattle. I didn’t even make it into the the Apple store as there was an AT&T kiosk out front that had the white 32GB iPhone 3GS. I bought that and two more touch phones (non iPhones) for our kids. After tax the three phones came to around $525 which doesn’t take into account the two year (gasp) contract we’re now locked into.

Despite salesman pressure to do so, we didn’t cancel our Sprint EVDO card and go with AT&T’s version of that, but canceled all other Sprint business. Interesting sidenote: Sprint wasn’t throwing any significant deals at us to stay. We told them one of our only problems with them was that they refused to replace a broken phone ($150 phone) for us when we had paid for the warranty for two years because they said it wasn’t “accidental damage.” Another reason we don’t have love for any of these cell phone carriers.

So we gave into the AT&T demons and bought an iPhone 3GS. I must say after using the iPhone 3GS the last week or so it’s the most useful phone I’ve ever used. I didn’t buy it to be cool or be the first one on the block with one or anything silly like that.

With that said, there are things about the iPhone 3GS I don’t yet understand how to do or like. The app screen organization is clumsy, for example. I’ll skip making a list as I haven’t owned it long enough to learn if the things I don’t like are my newbieness or actual design flaws.

Oh that glorious app store

Speaking of the app store. Wow, that thing is jammed. There are a bunch of free apps and paid apps. Here are the first two apps I paid for:

• eWallet ($9.99) – this allows me to sync via WiFi with my Windows desktop version of eWallet to manage all the logins and user accounts I keep online. Since I don’t duplicate passwords and use strong passwords where allowed, this application is indispensible
• Trek Keno ($0.99) – hey, Star Trek + Keno, gotta have it

Here’s a few free apps I’ve tried so far:

• Pandora (music) – wow, talk about getting a free radio station of music you like streamed. Just plug in an artist you enjoy like say, Ozzy Osbourne, and Pandora will create a station around that artist.
• Tap Tap Revenge (game) – think Rock Band drums and Guitar Hero and you’ll get the idea of what this is about. A bunch of free songs you can download and play.
• Waterslide (game) – tilt the iPhone to move you down a 3D waterslide. A quick distraction type game.
• SportsTap (sports / news) – keep track of sport scores. Also has a neat prediction section which will guess as to who is going to win based on a bunch of different stats. Might be of use to sports bettors.
• AroundMe (location based) – a portable version of our Garmin GPS that tells you what banks/ATMs, bars, coffee, gas stations, hospitals, hotels and more are nearby. Then you can get directions. Handy.
• Nike+iPod (fitness) – along with a pair of Nike+ shoes you can track how many calories you are burning walking around or running. Optionally you can have iTunes transfer the stats to nikeplus.com and do even more.

Being there are tons of apps, other iPhone users are welcome to suggest other apps I should check out in the comments below. Also, if you think I made a mistake or the right decision in this phone person, you’re welcome to weigh in.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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