Another Annoying iPhone User is Born

I have joined the ranks of annoying iPhone users. You know, those people who can't stop playing with their phones because they're so cool and do so many things, and they're really happy about it, and the rest of world wishes they'd just shut the heck up already. I know. I know because last week I was one of you.

Here's how it went: For many years I was a Sprint customer for my cell phones. I was never thrilled with Sprint, but the service usually seemed decent enough. I was also pretty sure I only wanted a phone to be a phone, and not to be a camera and an organizer and a game unit.

But, as time went on, I became more and more annoyed by Sprint's problems. Large areas where they claim to have service where there's no signal at all, and calls that I never receive until I get the notification that somebody left me a voice mail (sometimes hours later). I also got used to the idea that having several uses to a single gadget could be a benefit. But I still wasn't convinced that I wanted to go with AT&T, the only "legal" carrier for the iPhone.

So I decided to seriously study which cell services were the best. I asked everybody I work with. I posted the question on Twitter and Facebook. I also checked articles on CNet and elsewhere for reviews of the services from the "professionals." I only found one other person who still used (and liked) Sprint. The AT&T and Verizon supporters were pretty much split, with Verizon coming out slightly ahead in the reviews.

AT&T (and I believe the others as well) will allow you to cancel an account within 30 days without penalty and return a phone for a refund, less a 10% restocking fee. I figured that fee would be worth it to take the iPhone for test drive and see if AT&T service would suffice. If it failed, I could always go to Verizon. So I picked up an iPhone a little over a week ago.

I tested the phone from the Santa Cruz pier, to my home in the mountains, to Los Gatos and Sunnyvale, and up to the Stanford Mall in Palo Alto. The only place I had no signal was in the dead center of the Ikea store (but it worked closer to the entrance). I can't say that AT&T is vastly superior to Sprint, but it's certainly no worse.

Beyond finding the service acceptable, I've been loving the device itself. I love that the calendar and address book on my Mac automatically syncs with the calendar and address book on the iPhone using the MobileMe service. I love having my email with me, wherever I am. I love the camera - far better than any other in-phone camera I've seen. And I love the apps (checking movie times while out and about, posting to Twitter whenever I like, and, yes, the games).

And so, this last Friday, I returned to the AT&T store and had them re-assign my Sprint number to the iPhone, picked up a new phone for the wife, and canceled our Sprint account. Like there was any possible way I was going to return the iPhone once I had it in my hands.

Sabotage!

A deliberate act of expertise vandalism is now being blamed for the phone system outage that today stifled electronic communication through Santa Cruz and parts of Santa Clara and San Benito Counties along the southern edge of California's Silicon Valley.

Last night, at around 2 AM, cables were cut in several locations throughout the area using specialized equipment:

"... saboteurs had to use a piece of equipment to lift heavy manhole covers and climb down several feet to get to the cables. They would have to have been equipped with heavy-duty cutting equipment to slice through the thick cable coating."

The outage effected most cell phones, many land lines, and much internet traffic in the region. 911 emergency lines could not be reached, and fire departments took to hillside perches to scan the area for smoke or other signs of problems.

The good news is the lack of panic. While stories are now emerging of people frustrated by the situation, and people driving to hospitals who otherwise would have called ambulances, there was no vandalism or crimes reported (yet) as a result. Banks allowed only a customer or two in at a time, issuing hand-written receipts, stores and restaurants hung "cash only" signs on their doors, and life went on as usual. Well, usual for 1975.

My own experience of the day was seeing a headline about the outage early this morning, and not really thinking about it until I got in my car, turned on my bluetooth headset and realized that I had no signal. My first stop was to meet with some people at a coffee shop in Ben Lomond.

That's when I heard more about the outage, but, somehow, their wi-fi was working. Although I couldn't use my personal email because my ISPs server was rejecting connections, I was able to get some messages out through Gmail, and Twitter gave me connections to a few friends.

After that it was on to my client's office. By then phone lines were restored for local service only, but no long distance calls were getting in or out, cell phones were still not working, and the Internet connection was down.

A motive for the sabotage is still unknown, and systems are still not fully functional after nearly 20 hours.

Cell phones and the end privacy

A couple of weeks ago we saw a great example of how the prevalence of cell phone cameras can be a great equalizer between the people and those in power when a UCLA student caught a video of campus police repeatedly tazing a student.

Of course, this is really nothing new. Think of the video of the Rodney King beating, and other examples going back at least a decade. The number of video capable devices in ordinary people's hands has grown by leaps and bounds since then, making these types of incidents all the more common.

We all now carry electronic devices that we can use to turn on others, and others can use to turn on us - both for good and bad results. That three members of the Kim family were rescued earlier this week (unfortunately, the father, James, was finally found, dead, today) from a frozen Oregon wilderness was in great part due to the ability track in on their cell phone when a friend sent them a text message.

The flip side of the same piece of technology is shown in this article: FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool. I bet you didn't even know this was possible - that your cell company could flip a switch that would turn your phone into a bug even when you are not making a call.

The article shows how this technique was used to put surveillance on organized crime figures. I know, you're not a mobster, so you're not worried. But, in this age of national security paranoia, when the president can declare anybody he (dis)likes an "enemy combatant" and have them held indefinitely, it gets a whole lot scarier.

Then, just as I was finishing that article, I received this question by email:

I've been thinking.

It used to be that if you were going to do something wrong, the only people you had to worry about busting you were the police.

Now that every cell phone comes, inexplicably, equipped with a camera, ordinary citizens are doing a lot of the busting and going public with their videos on YouTube.

Is this constant threat of exposure a good thing?

My reply:

Double-edged sword -- It can be a great tool for democracy and people power by keeping the authorities in check -- But it can also be used by less upstanding people to destroy any concept of privacy.

Welcome to our brave new world.