The iMan

So. I have an iPhone.

After doing lots of different research through different companies and different carriers/sites/et cetera, Daisy and I realized that none of the options were going to be any better than any other, and some of said options were incredibly expensive to even start out with a new contract. For example, one carrier I looked at charged $250 up front for the phone and the first month's service plan, and that was a plan with very limited data and talk/text limits as well.

"So what do you want to do?" Daisy asked.

"I suppose we just go to Sprint and see what they can do," I said. "Nothing else is remotely reasonable and/or won't require me to buy the phone off-the-shelf up front."

I don't know if any of you have ever purchased a cell phone off-the-shelf before, but let me tell you, it is not fucking cheap. Most current smartphones cost more than my desktop computer did. Some of them cost more than I paid for my car. If you buy a phone yourself outright before signing up for a plan, yes, you may save some money in the long run, but it's so little that it's negligible when spread out over the length of a cell phone contract.

And of course, there's the fact that we don't have $400-600 to just spend all at once on a phone before any sort of plan even comes into play.

My iPhone 5c (they were sold out of the 5s; apparently there's some sort of promotion going on right now where current customers can get a free upgrade) was, on paper, $549. That is more than I paid for my car. That is much more than I paid for this desktop computer. However, it's worked into my contract that I don't pay it all at once, but over the course of the two years I'm with Sprint.

When it was all settled and done, I had a white iPhone 5c 16GB running iOS 7.1-something, unlimited talk/text/data, and I'm paying somewhere around $80 a month. When it comes to cell phone carriers, the phone I have, and the plan I have, that's a really good deal, actually. We priced Verizon beforehand as well -- they charge over $200 a month for a very similar plan. We got the best deal we could for the money. The 5c was (obviously) cheaper than the 5s as well.

As for the phone itself? Eh, I'm happy with it. No, it's not the metal-and-glass 5s, but it's good. It's fine. I still don't really know how to use it that well yet. Mind you, I've never owned a smartphone, and the only experience I've had with one is the handful of times I've had to make a call on Daisy's phone, or when she handed me the phone while driving and told her to text Mama something. Beforehand, I consulted Parker, who is an Apple-phile and owns basically every new i-device, on the learning curve of an iPhone for someone who's not only never owned one before, but who has never used a smartphone before. He gave me some good tips on how to use it, what services to turn on/turn off, and then told me that it's going to take a week or so to get used to it. I can totally see and believe that.

I haven't done much with the phone yet; I installed the Facebook and Twitter apps, installed an app for one of my favorite podcasts, and put Instagram on the phone despite the fact that I do not yet have an Instagram account. I called my mother as well as my grandmother, since I can now actually talk to them without having to worry about dropping a call or running out of minutes, and gave them my new number. I migrated my number book from my old phone into the new one manually, one contact at a time, weeding out the numbers of people I've not called in years and/or no longer need. I texted a few close friends to let them know I have the new phone and a new number.

I also got my first wrong number phone call not half an hour after I got the phone. They were asking for someone named Charlene.

"That's a bad sign," Daisy said. Daisy herself has had the same number for years, and she still gets calls for some woman who apparently had her number before her and didn't bother to change it for certain things (like prescription refills and the like).

I haven't gotten any more wrong number calls yet, but it's not like anyone really ever calls me to talk to me, so it doesn't really matter. What's important is that I now have a reliable phone that actually gets signal around the city, and can finally let the other old one die -- not that it works here anyhow.

So that's done, at least. That was a major thing I needed to get taken care of since, well, basically since I moved up here. It's a new expense, yes, but it's one we just have to bite the bullet on and take -- it's not like I could go forever without having a phone, because that's just not feasible in today's world. I justify it to myself by saying that I've finally leapt into the 21st century by getting a GPS that updates itself, by getting a way of actually talking to people that I don't have to pay for per minute or per message, by having a device that fits in my pocket that lets me access the entirety of the internet anywhere, anytime.

It's not like I needed any of those things to survive, mind you, and I'm sure to many of you, this is nothing new -- many of my friends have had iPhones (or equivalent smartphones) since their inception almost ten years ago now. But to me, it's all new. I am so inexperienced with it that I have no clue where to start. I'm like a child given a new toy with all sorts of different ways to play with it. When I was a child, most of my toys were pretty basic. The newest game system was a NES. The most complicated toys were Transformers. Now, with children growing up in the world of fully electronic toys that I only wish I would've had as a kid, and playing Xboxes and Playstations that have games that look real, the iPhone is the last thing that I really have left in this world that I can actually marvel at as an adult -- as I've never experienced anything like that before. If I were to leap back in time to 20 years ago, 1994, and tell my younger self that in 2014 I would have a phone half the size of my hand that accessed the entirety of human knowledge and recreation and allowed me to take it anywhere and talk to anyone I wanted as long as I wanted in various ways? I'm not sure I would've believed my future self. So yeah, I'm stoked that I have a new piece of technology, and no, I wouldn't have changed waiting this long to get it for anything. Will I use it as much as the average smartphone users use their phones? Probably not, but the fact that I can is what's exciting about it.