iGet better and better

Am I an addict? A night does not pass when I don't pick up my iPhone and check out my feeds, latest Installer apps or to read a chapter using the eBook reader. This truly is a life changing device. Prior to buying one I got sucked into the hype and then got over it. Then I bought one and got all excited again and again got over it as I thought I'd discovered everything but wait, there's more.

The number of applications available is growing by the day and is truly staggering in the variety. My latest install is Nemus Sync which lets me sync any of my Google Calendars to the native iPhone Calendar. This means I can keep an eye on interesting things going on around town through my subscription to the Wellingtonista calendar feed, and Mrs R knows where I am and where I am going to be as it is a two way feed and she can access it from home!

I've just been watching TV with one eye and listening to snippets of the Top Ten on iTunes on the iPhone. Number four is "Sweet About Me" by Gabriella Cilmi and a double tap gives me the whole album to peruse. Some great tracks so a few taps later and I've bought it; easy. Weirdly enough, some of the tracks remind me of Tears For Fears, whose tracks fill a large slug of my iTunes library; strange how your music tastes slowly alter but the theme is never far from your youth.

Now I don't mind paying for music (a musician's gotta live and talent don't pay the bills) and I remember back a few years when Napster was the rage. A lot of people wanted free music but the power of Napster was the enormous variety and common meeting place for file sharing of often non-mainstream music. Forget the big record labels, file sharing is the home of the long tail and this is the model that helped to make Amazon the success it is and clearly Apple knows this.

I remember having a conversation with my father in law back in 2001 and he had been trying to find a single track by a humorist called Victor Borge that he had heard many years before. I found it in minutes on Napster and would have happily paid a premium for the track if the model had existed back then. So fly forward 7 years and I'm sitting on my sofa, I type Borge into iTunes and in seconds can preview a wide collection of his work and can pay for any tracks or albums I want, right there, no delay, no fuss. Amazing really; record stores can't possibly last another 2 years.