I Haz An iPhone

Pretty much my face on my birthday.

I finally joined the iPhone club. I've been a part of the Mac club for many a year, starting out with the pride and joy that was my very first, plastic-encased PowerBook (I loved that thing), and part of the iPod club a few times over with my iPod Nano (Christmas present), iPod touch (freebie) and now my iPod shuffle (for running). And now I have an Apple phone. 

Hooray!

I've wanted one of these almost since it first came out (the first one was ex-pen-sive, and an unnecessarily high price tag makes things less attractive). When I found out that the iPhone 5 was only $200 I was sold. (For clarification, yes, $200 is still a ton of money for a phone, but the cheapest phone I wanted was $150, so "only" is accurate.) I was interested in the iPhone 4 but by then 4G had already come out and I wasn't willing to invest in a phone system that was already on its way out. And I'd just bought a phone I thought wasn't going to be as shitty as it turned out to be.

And because the boyfriend is awesome and has a paycheck that makes him want to spoil the girlfriend, he got me the shiniest, newest phone for my birthday. Eeeee!

It comes, however, with somewhat of a caveat: AT&T. I swore up and down when I left AT&T/Cingular that I'd never go back. But you do things for love. I didn't want the iPhone 5 badly enough to leave T-Mobile on my own, but getting a family plan with the boyfriend did the trick. We agreed that at the end of two years if AT&T sucked we'd look into other carriers, an agreement that works for us both. And T-Mobile was kind of pissing me off.

My shiny new phone did come with a little hiccup: like I do any time I get a new electronic, I let the battery run out completely the first use. It took more than two days, a very impressive feat. But when I went to plug the thing in to give it a good, full, first charge, nothing. I left it plugged in overnight and it got about a 15% charge, and leaving it plugged in at work kept that charge but didn't seem to do much in the way of adding to it.  A quick trip to the Apple Store (as quick as a trip to Fashion Valley can be) fixed it and I walked out a few minutes later with a working cable. Yay! Gotta hand it to those guys: no paperwork, didn't have to sign anything, didn't have to "check out" or verify the registration of my phone. That's nice.

I'm obviously still learning my new phone, but there are some clear differences I already see between the iPhone and my old Android. The camera, for one, is fantastic. Not only does it have a flash, but it has a front facing camera, which is a pretty sweet little tool. Not surprisingly, the first photo I took was of food and my first two Instagram photos (yep, on there now) were pets. Being able to talk to my phone and tell it to dial a number is also a cool trick. It synching with my computer and my Google account to keep everything up to date? Convenient. The 4G LTE is worlds faster than my shitty phone on a 3G network, and checking Facebook isn't a pain in the ass anymore.

The keyboard is spot on, though auto-correct isn't as intuitive, but that may be because it doesn't know my style yet. It's also a hell of a lot larger than my old phone, but still a hell of a lot smaller than the boyfriend's new phone (HTC One X, partially because he can't rely on a shitty maps app), and way smaller than the other phone I was considering, the Samsung Galaxy S3, which might as well be a tablet as far as my little fingers are concerned. I have yet to use the maps app, but I'm not really concerned about it: I don't use maps very often and we jokingly decided that he'll be the navigator since I'm usually the driver. 

All in all, I'm really happy to have an Apple phone to go with my Apple computer, and to have a phone that I can still fit in my hand. Not to mention, I'm the only one I know with this phone, the only one with the newest phone on the block, something that's never happened. I feel so hip. Plus, I got it a pretty orange case, so it's extra hip and less prone to damage from the accidents I seem to have and to prevent the soft aluminum from scratching (did it need to be so light that you swapped steel for aluminum?). Even so, it feels really sturdy, like it'd live if I drop it. Not that I intend on dropping it... but it's something I do.