iPhones, Fords, and Al Gore; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Official Phone of God

There is no doubt about it, the fanatic iPhone frenzy is en fuego. People geekier than the under and over weight male who have never seen female genitalia Star Wars crowd, I call them iLosers, lined up around the corner 2 days in advance to buy an Ipod that’s been scotch-taped to a phone.

To give you an idea of the gravity of the situation, we need to have a look in the current marketplace.  On the left we have the white collar, corporate loving, can’t live without my Blackberry. On the right we have the the oldest and largest world standard of handheld operating systems, the Palm Treo with eleventy billion applications available for free on the internet. And in the middle we have the Razr: the smallest, cheapest, hip phone that’s so easy to use, even The Gimp can handle it.Somewhere in left field we have the iPhone. A cell phone that doesn’t ’push’ corporate email, doesn’t have a Palm operating system, is bleeding expensive, and can’t even tie your shoes. All from a computer company whose user base consists solely of artists, people in bands, and the unemployed.

But none of that matters because its so far out in left field that it’s a grand slam, it’s a hole in one, it’s the biggest single leap forward for mankind since the invention of beer. Let me just throw out a selection of tidbits: visual voicemail, dynamic predictive text, target adaptive keyboard, internal accelerometer, Mp3 Cover Flow, widescreen movie player, real web pages, and Airplane mode just to name a few.

You simply rub your fingers gently over it and, like a good woman, it responds to your desires. It interfaces with you so intuitively, so viscerally, that you’re left lamenting on all those years of thumbing stupid plastic wheels and writing with inkless pens like a idiot.

They’ve done away with that trivial and tedious feature, the keyboard, so they could fit the first ever high definition aspect video screen. Unless you need a keyboard, to which one pops up on the first ever optic-quality glass touchscreen. Then using its ‘advanced mathematical algorithms’, you can bang away a text faster than on even a desktop since it corrects all errors on the fly in real time, even names, places, and brands.

Corporate email? Who needs that when half of all emails in the world are solicitations for a bigger penis? Besides, the second you experience this thing you’ll want to quit that hopeless ladder climb and spend the rest of your life in mom’s basement with your iPhone watching that youtube of Al Gore claiming he invented the internet.

 

 

The iPhone is jam-packed with nerdy techno-wizardry combining every device you could or should want and merging it with such sophisticated elegance that it could well be fueled with frappuccino. So cool and clean, a silver and black art deco world of discrete sculpture that makes even me look as cool as Bono. Technically it is a phone, yet it just isn’t.

Using it is literally like stepping 100 years into the future. As of June 29, 2007, all Blackberry’s and Treo’s are officially dinosaurs. But you know, by next Tuesday we’ll have the Appleberry and the Treo 8000 with glass this and myspace that in a vainglorious struggle to compete by adding cool features with flash names to the same old same old.

Where we arrive at Ford Motor Co. Recently, they wanted to compete in the premium-luxury-sporty-suv market with the Porsche Cayenne and the BMW X5. But they didn’t have enough money to do the job properly. So they took their Land Rover Disco 3 chassis and added the body from their Range Rover and the engine from their Lincoln LS.

But that combination nearly killed all occupants on impact, so they added girders to the under-sides. But all that weight slowed it down, so they installed the supercharger from their old Jaguar XJR.  Which emptied the coffers leaving no money to tune any sporty-ness into it. 

So what’d they do?  They named it the ’Sport’.  Leaving it with less athleticism than Michael Moore and with a ride like that which a Buick salesman would call, ” dreamy”.

Likely, you’re thinking it’s a half-ass’d attempt to get a new vehicle to market as quickly and cheaply as possible. And you’re right. Yet I noticed that while the ‘Sport’ does have spin control, their website does not:

– …it delivers awesome power for a thrilling and involving drive.

Power without control tends to be like that. Car and Driver as always, was equally firing from the spin zone:

– …Stomping on the gas pedal will give you a healthy shove in the back.

And your wallet. But 10 out of 24 paragraphs of their review contained superlative references to the abundance of power in a supercharged vehicle whose 0-60 time of 7.2 seconds makes it no faster than a Honda Civic Si. The brochure was particularly interesting when it referred to Ford’s idea of blending performance with style:

– …it looks like it’s moving even when it’s standing still.

I get the points; optimism. But I’m a realist, which is why my latest DVD, HEAVY METAL, charts my quest, or conquest, to find the best suv, of all time. It is of course spin-free, but surprisingly, out of a selection of 17 very popular suv’s, only 2 are any good at all with one being astonishingly good and the rest being quite horrific in a Nick Lachey’s talent kind of way.

The 2006 release turned into 2007 due to no fault of my own. Apparently there is a law against shooting up a car with a machine gun no matter how awful it is to drive. Target practicing on private property is legal in just about every jurisdiction in America.  Except where I was.  So 26 hours of community service later and now it’s out.

Resulting in almost two hours of manly, ball stomping automotive action for the price of only one.  Wait, that’s not true. You get it for the price of free! Understand, I have a problem with current copyright laws. The way I see it, it only help the rich get richer and the expense of the poor.

So what’s Al Gore doing in the title? Well contrary to popular belief, CO2 does NOT drive climate, whatsoever. Yet driving Hummers and Range Rovers and other great symbols of American freedom may soon be outlawed thanks to legislation sparked by Mr. Bore.

Well at least thanks to Judge something or other, I can now get back to regularly not updating my website.

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