Outside the Beltway

Perils of the iPhone

Steven L. Taylor
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Via the LAT: The risk for iPhone users: They know too much

When she whipped out her iPhone, Erica Sadum could feel her husband’s eyes roll. But she had a point to prove. And in less than a minute, she was able to report to the skeptics around the dinner table that Menno Simons, whose followers are known as Mennonites, was in fact born in 1496.

[…]

“It’s turned me from a really annoying know-it-all into an incredibly annoying know-it-all, with the Internet to back me up,” said Sadum, a technology writer in Denver. “It’s not a social advantage.”

Sort of blogging as performance art, I guess.

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10 responses to “Perils of the iPhone”

  1. rodney dill Avatar
    rodney dill

    The opposite side is that there are a lot of socially rude people out there that insist they are right (often over trivial things), and brow beat you to the point that its not worth arguing with them unless you have the facts.

    (No I don’t have an iPhone, and I don’t intend to get one any time soon)

  2. Dave Schuler Avatar
    Dave Schuler

    The only thing smugger than an Apple user is an Apple user who drives a Prius.

  3. John Burgess Avatar
    John Burgess

    Dave: …and lives on the Left Coast.

  4. LaurenceB Avatar
    LaurenceB

    I think the iPhone is a nice device, but the fact is that anyone with any mobile device (phone or PDA) who has a data plan, can find the birth date of Simons. The iPhone Safari (webkit) browser is a little more convenient than most, but even old-style WML browsers can find Simons birth date, assuming the user knows where to point the browser to. (And of course there are native downloaded applications also – J2ME, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, etc. that search wikipedia and so on.)

    I guess what I’m saying is that the iPhone hype is getting a little annoying.

  5. rodney dill Avatar
    rodney dill

    I guess what I’m saying is that the iPhone hype is getting a little annoying.

    True, I use SMS Google on a pretty basic Samsung phone to find addresses and phone numbers of businesses, at only the cost of a text message. Where I work everyone also has access to the internet and is pretty much on all the time so looking up information there is easier than even a phone. I do have friends that will surf the web at lunch on their iPhone and iPod Touch, respectively, but then I’m used to hanging out with some uber geeks.

  6. Bithead Avatar
    Bithead

    Rodney;

    Pick up my writeback from my place, linked above.
    Short version: Look, it’s ot just the Iphone, it’s the network it connects to… along with every other computer technology, anymore.

  7. se7en Avatar
    se7en

    First of all… It’s Erica Sadun… (http://ericasadun.com/)

    And the LA Times is an abysmal source of journalism.

  8. William Teach Avatar
    William Teach

    Just wait till the iPhone has 3G, and people can look stuff up that much faster!

  9. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    I think the iPhone is a nice device, but the fact is that anyone with any mobile device (phone or PDA) who has a data plan, can find the birth date of Simons.

    It’s not so much the software as the hardware that makes it impressive. Personally I’d be more interested in it if it were running Android or OpenMoko, but even then it’s pretty pricey.

    Short version: Look, it’s ot just the Iphone, it’s the network it connects to… along with every other computer technology, anymore.

    “The network is the computer”, maybe we’ll see that day after all.

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