There was a big brouhaha over the weekend as the Apple iPhone alarm clock failed to work on both News Years day and January 2nd. Then the problem self-corrected on the third for some reason nobody bothered to explain.
I first found out about it on the 2nd when my podcasting partner, Adam Curry, was moaning about how the alarms didn't work on his iPhone, and he didn't get up on time to prep for the show we do on Sunday morning. I thought it was peculiar. Peculiar that people use the iPhone as an alarm clock!
Apparently, a lot of people use the iPhone as an alarm clock, adding more dubious usefulness to the device. I know that over the years, the mobile phone has essentially replaced the wrist watch. When people want to know the time they pull out their mobile phone and look at it. This has the added advantage of giving you the opportunity to check for important messages.
After all, we will die on the spot and be humiliated by the throngs of passersby if we are not up to the second with our messaging obligations. It's gotten so bad that the evil phones are now at our bedsides to wake us up. Then when this questionable function fails, the world goes into a tizzy.
Check out the headline from Ars Technica, "Fool me twice: iPhone users burned again with new alarm bug." The "fool me twice" bit refers to an apparent horrendous daylight savings time gaffe the phone made earlier. Oh, the agony!
Here's some info from this lament:
| Like the Daylight Saving Time bug before it, the New Year bug was first exposed by our friends in New Zealand, who discovered that their non-repeating alarm clocks simply wouldn't go off once the calendar flipped over. iPhone users across Asia, and then Europe, also unexpectedly got to sleep in on New Year's Day. By the time morning came to the US, many of us had become aware of the bug—but that didn't stop it from affecting a few readers here and there. |
Stop the presses, a friggin' cell phone clock stopped working!
This brings us to the real topic at hand: our ridiculous dependence on these devices. It all began with answering machines and pagers and has been worsening over the years. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Unless you're a doctor on call or some sort of emergency worker, you don't need to be this connected. Yes, once a year, your kid will get sick at school, and the school needs to know if you'll pick them up. But how often is it life or death? It's a convenience to be able to get that message, and that's it.
Once you've plugged in to get the one possible emergency message a decade, you end up getting thousands of non-emergency, annoying messages in between. Most people have convinced themselves that these messages are important, so they voluntarily plug into the system and become tethered to it. The text messages and voice messages begin to pour in from friends, bosses, and co-workers.
And of course this all begins in the morning when the phone itself wakes you up. Nobody finds this a little peculiar?
Source and copy rights : http://www.pcmag.com/article2
No comments:
Post a Comment