(Tim) Until this past week, I'd never owned a smartphone. David's been using them for years but I always said I didn't need one since I take my laptop everywhere. Then, my two-year-old cellphone neared death and, realizing an iPhone would only cost me about $50-100 more than any other cell phone I'd buy, and that having an iPhone would only add $10 to my monthly AT&T bill, I got an iPhone 3GS.
For four or five years, I've been tethering my laptops to my cell phone using a bluetooth connection that worked well and only cost $20 per month for unlimited data. They always told me it wasn't an official setup, but my local Cingular/AT&T store was helpful and I loved it. E-mail was fast but browsing could be slow. It was about the speed of an old 56k dial-up connection, for those of you who remember those. But it always worked.
When traveling by car, I got in the habit of buying our hotel room on Priceline as the evening progressed and we knew where we'd be when we wanted to go to sleep. One time in Pittsburgh, we bought our room at 10:55 PM and were in bed within the hour.
All this to say, I was loath (quick now, and without looking it up, what's the difference between loathe, loath, and loth?) to give up tethering in order to make the switch to an iPhone. Then Joseph told me an easy tethering solution was available for the new GS, and I bit...
He was right; tethering doesn't require me to jailbreak my phone and it's about as easy as easy can get--much easier than the method I had to use to set up tethering on my old Sony Ericsson. Now, when I need to type, I can pull out my laptop. But for everything else, the iPhone is much more convenient. And for those of you who haven't joined the smartphone masses, yet, I do mean everything else!
Being color blind, I'm not painter. But did you know the cover of the latest New Yorker is a painting done on an iPhone? It took the painter about an hour. Here's a video of his work.
