My rant is against those who spend five minutes finding the line-up of a festival they actually went to only a couple of weeks ago, in order to tell me who they thought was good. My rant is against those who will check what sushi means WHILST IN A JAPANESE RESTAURANT, being served by native, billingual waitresses. My rant is against those who, rather than speak to the many brightly t-shirted university students that are dotted around campus to ask for walking directions to somewhere nearby, will use GPS to get them there. My point is, depending on the person who owns it, the iPhone HAS THE POTENTIAL TO (BUT DOESN’T NECESSARILY MEAN THAT IT WILL DO) make people lazy, uncommunicative and unwilling to branch out of their comfort zone or think a little bit harder for a little bit longer, which can be good for the brain, as you well know. So I think, essentially, we probably fundamentally agree.

In summary: you’re right. Okay? Cool.

Come off it. Having a smartphone doesn’t preclude you from knowing stuff! Partly it is about “taking the path of least resistance”. But if I’m out somewhere, 20 minutes drive away from my pc, and I want to look something up (such as the location of a shop, or some other equally inane piece of information), then I’m quite glad to have a tool which saves me that time. As to people taking 5 minutes to look stuff up and not talking to you, that’s not exactly the fault of the phone, and merely possessing one doesn’t make that scenario a certainty.

You say “problem solving is a good skill to have”, and that’s right. I choose to give myself a better scope to solve problems by carrying around a device which enables me to quickly access information. There may well be “pleasantry in simplicity”, and the iPhone is a device that can make life simpler. So what’s the issue?

/rant

@Andy
Heh, there’s an app for that… Actually that’s a remarkably clever way to do it. I ended up going for this one.

No idea which one to get though…

The killing conversation is mainly hyperbole to put a bitter point across. I have had several instances in which people whip out the internet to check a minor detail which was really unnecessary, and really irks me, especially if it’s like, in a restaurant or something. They end up spending five minutes looking it up and not paying attention to what you’re saying and in the end it doesn’t really matter what other movies Quentin Tarintino has done or exactly how many counties there are in Ireland. Plus, there’s more merit in knowing something because you know it rather than because there’s a screen in front of you telling you so. Don’t make your minds lazy, kids, mkay?

My phone has the radio, though the old fashioned FM kind, but on a phone? OMGZ gogo gadget!

But yeh, I now have a new shiny iPhone 4 from Best Buy, that was an awesome tip, they had about a million of them. Traded in my 3G, ended up only £25 out of pocket for the iPhone 4, which I think is a massive win.

Anyways, try as I might, I actually can’t replicate the antenna problem. I’ve been properly death-gripping it, and absolutely nothing happens to the signal. So yeh, very happy!

Alas, if I blog or tweet about it, people are going to be a pain about the “antenna problem”. Luckily, I’ve shown one twitterer friend of mine it today, and she too noticed how nothing happened, so with any luck she’ll defend me.

@Jenny:
Heh yeah, I don’t generally write lengthy stuff on it either. I can only just tolerate writing stuff on the laptop, I prefer to have loads of space to see what I’ve written as well as what I’m responding to.

For BBC radio, there’s two ways apparently. Download an app called Wunder Radio, which has BBC and lots of local radio streams. Or download FStream, and then point it to one of these streams. I’ve not tried either of these methods, but they’re what Google suggests :-)