Lightly Organized Chaos

Here’s what’s on my iPhone, what’s on yours?
(mouse over for names, and don’t bother clicking, they don’t link anywhere)

So I finally got an iPhone. After waiting a full year (and desperately trying to get a 16GB black), I ended up buying an 8GB iPhone. Which pretty much means I’m only a GPS chip and a bit of speed ahead of the previous owners.

Some quick notes on the iPhone. It kicks my Motorola Razr to the curb in terms of call quality. Whereas I could barely make a call from the top floor of my house, before, the iPhone is handling it with aplomb.

Calling this thing a smartphone is seriously undervaluing it as a computing/information platform. It’s really an ultra-portable computing device. Many of the apps I’ve loaded serve to extend my full desktop environment into my pocket. The always accessible nature of the apps and associated data is pretty powerful. Where some people think it’s great to be able to use Word or Excel from a handheld device, give me the whole Internet any day of the week.

I should point out that not all Wii owners are stupid sheep, just the ones paying huge markups to get the latest widget from the folks at Nintendo.

The Wii has been in (artificially?) short supply since it’s release almost 1.5 years ago, and this week Nintendo released Wii Fit; which is apparently also hard to buy… at least in stores. At Amazon and eBay you can get a Wii Fit for prices as high as $500. In fact eBay currently lists almost 7000 results for Wii Fit.

While I understood the rush to obtain the Wii console itself (christmas season), the Wii Fit doesn’t deserve this kind of hype. Currently only 2 games support the peripheral: the bundled game and We Ski (which is supposed to be only OK). Furthermore the packed in game is probably of only limited entertainment for most younger gamers. If the Wii itself is any indication it’s going to take game developers a while to make more than cursory use of the Wii Fit Balance Board as a controller, so I don’t see this situation improving in the next 2-3 months.

My intuition is that the majority of stock in Wii Fit has gone to pre-orders and a significant number of those are now up on eBay. Driven by scarcity and hype people (parents?) are paying stupid prices to get a device that will probably languish in their basements within a couple of months.

I’d like a copy of Wii Fit. I need to lose weight and any gadget that gets me to focus on my health is good. But I’m not going to pay more than MSRP ($90 is already high for the device), and I encourage others to do the same. As long as people are willing to shell out premium prices for the latest gizmo, the speculators (and manufacturers) are going to create artificial market conditions to their benefit.

I’ve been seeing someone new for a bit, and it’s going pretty well. For the time being let’s call her Miss I (or just Missi). She’s not cool with her identity being on released here, but if you get a chance to hang out with me anytime soon I’m sure you’ll meet her.