Let me defend the iPhone for a minute.

My first phone was a hefty Nokia candy bar with a simple black on green LCD display. It had the standard address books, preset ringtones, and a Snake game. Everything you could ever want.

My second phone was a horrific, LG Phone that won me over because it had a screen on the outside of its clamshell as well as inside. It had a button on it that would charge me an extra $3.00 at the end of the month if I pressed it, every time I pressed it. Eventually, the outside screen became a snowcrashed mess.

My third phone was a Motorola SLVR, or whatever. This time it was about a fourth of the size of the original, fit well into my pocket, and did everything I wanted except for texting, whcih I didn't really care for to begin with. My only problem with it was the metallic inserts glued to the tops of the keys eventually came off, exposing the gel beneath.

My fourth and current phone, is my iPhone 3G. I got it because I felt they got the interface for it right (Why should I have to press * and then 3 to unlock my phone? If it's going to be hard to type, why shouldn't the phone try to help me? etc.), and because a discount because of my job. Also, the web browser on it is absolutely second to none in terms of rendering capability and web standards (notice that idkfa on the iPhone looks the same as idkfa on the computer).

Apple really did nothing with the iPhone that they don't do with other products: they take a stagnant tech market with products with confusing and slight technical variation but identically frustrating functionality, they solve human interface issues, integrate already existing technology, and sell it to everyman using the best marketing team on the planet.

There are technologically more impressive phones out there, but they're really only interesting to geeks like me, and they unfortunately don't usually sell to geeks like me.

Some of the functionaltiy and design decisions of the iPhone still irritate me. Which is probably why I jailbroke my phone in order to get my way (I have Navi from Zelda as my email sound). And while some applications are truly useful, I tire of being woken up at midnight to somebody taking their turn in Scrabble. The efficacy of the iPhone antenna compared to that of other phones would take an RF engineer to comment on.

The reason why I defend the phone is because instead of competing with Blackberry to find more clever ways to access your work email, or otherwise solve the same problems over and over again, they chose to do something else entirely. And now every Blackberry has a touch screen. Right above their tiny keyboard and excruciating scroll wheel.

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When it comes to computers, aside from my penchant for gadgetry, simplicity and practicality reign supreme. It has to work, work the first time, and work the same, and for as long as possible.

When you spend your days living in infinite complexity, determinism is your only path to sanity. Small tools that perform simple functions that are easily understood, and can be used in conjunction with other tools without issue or surprises.

I have a Macbook at home, but for the reason that it makes the stupid stuff easy (device drivers, etc.), and the hard stuff easier (I can do my Linux/Unix/whatever coding on the system and get the same work done).

My philosophy is probably best indicated by the search feature here on idkfa. It does the least surprising thing when you type something in and hit search. If you want to do something more complicated, you can, and if you learn the tool, it can be incredibly useful.

But I understand not everybody wants that. They want the Apple/Disney clean human interface to the otherwise ugly exchange of bytes.