Supposedly there are updates to Apple’s .Mac service due to be announced tomorrow. I can only hope it’s true, but I’m not sure if I’ll be enraged or depressed if they don’t happen. Fingers crossed.
Speaking of rumors, here’s an idea about the rumor that floated several weeks ago in which it was suggested that Apple might sometime in the future release a smaller, less expensive version of its iPhone in order to reach a wider consumer base.
How to Become a Switcher
I bet that rumor is hogwash, but if I’m wrong and they do release it, here’s one feature I’d like to see — or, what the heck, it’s a feature I bet we’ll see: on-the-fly phone number switching between multiple handsets. This would allow an extremely injudicious, pliant consumer like me to spend more money than anyone really should on mobile telephony and to own more than one model of iPhone. With this feature I’d be able to pick up any of those iPhones — the small one, the big one, the waterproof one, whatever — at any given time and push a button that says, in effect, “This is the phone I’m going to use this afternoon during my run in the park.” Or tonight out at dinner, or for the coming week during my trip to New Mexico, or whatever.
Unlike the iPod, it’s essential that any mobile phone you own be able to carry your identity with it. Otherwise, there’s just no reason to own more than one phone. On the other hand, if you had a phone to match any of a given number of occasions, and you could have all of your phone numbers, call history, voice mail etc. on any of them, and you could switch between those phones at will… well, wouldn’t you be willing to own more than one? You can laugh at the extravagance of this idea, but I bet more than a few readers out there own different wristwatches for different occasions, right? This is the way mobile phones are heading: functional jewelry.
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