Colin Marshall

So what pushed me to finally get an iPhone, even though I lack so much as a multi-digit income?

• I nearly slapped down the howevermany hundred dollars a first-generation iPhone cost when Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ Bloom hit the App Store. Having read Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices at least three times by that point, I’d grown familiar indeed with his enthusiasm for algorithms and devices that use randomness to create ever-changing music in real time. But he wrote the diaries that book comprises in 1995, and as such bemoans in them the limits the era’s hardware and software imposed on such “generative music” systems. Fewer such problems on the iPhone, which can handle the numerical processing and sonic synthesizing even as it takes its input — the “seed” of the music — from the patterns you tap into its touchscreen. This video gives you an idea of how the thing actually sounds. Eno and Chilvers released a follow-up, Trope, which expands on the Bloom idea by converting into music the motions of your finger across the screen, rather than just using individual points of tapping.

• The second dimension of irresistibility came in the iPhone’s mapping capabilities. Maps, as a form, keep drawing me back with their distinctive balance between the qualitative and the quantitative. (Edward Tufte‘s books on information design keep drawing me back for similar reasons, to the point that I did pay the howevermany hundreds of dollars for his experimental two-day course in Palo Alto.) So how was I going to resist the ability to scroll around scalable maps, overlayable with all sorts of data, of almost any corner of the Earth? That the iPhone offers the user GPS-based navigation of these maps didn’t matter so much in a town as small as Santa Barbara, but now that I navigate a new slice of Los Angeles almost every day, the iPhone’s onboard mapping software or any of hundreds of related apps add a great deal of value. I foresee this coming in very handy in the next foreign metropolis I explore, though I realize I’ll have to perform some sort of h@x0ring beforehand.

• As with any still-toddling technology, the first popular uses of the camera-phone — enthusiastic diners photographing their restaurant meals, Asian girls taking topless shots of themselves in bathroom mirrors — struck me as rather less impressive than I’d hoped. But at some point, the convenience the iPhone camera offers in documenting one’s peregrinations seemed too attractive to pass up. How else, I ask you, could I snap something like this on the go:

• But finally, my friends, the field recording did it. I had my doubts about how rich a sonic environment a microphone as small as the iPhone’s could really capture, but when sound artist (and Marketplace of Ideas guest) Alan Nakagawa played me some of the recordings he’d picked up with it, I knew immediately what I had to do. I don’t know if I’ll make the next New Zealand Stories with it or anything, but I’m sure it’ll earn its keep when I record impromptu interviews or travel podcasts like (two–time Marketplace of Ideas guest) Momus used to do.

Oh, and now that the iPhone 4S has all the kids talking, AT&T will cough up a 3GS for nothing more than your signature on a two-year contract and the cost of tax. I suppose I should mention the formidable aesthetic sense with which the iPhone is both imbued and associated, aesthetics being pretty much the only thing I ultimately care about, but you’ve probably heard enough on that subject already. Despite all the grand claims about the myriad technological advantages of, say, Android phones, Android fans tend to dress like they’ve just stepped out to get the paper.