Aslam Levy

For this story to be told in its entirety we would need to go back in history once or twice…

Flashback.
The year was 1995 and  the Sony Playstation was just released, this in a time when I was still saving to buy a Famicom TV Game (a Nintendo knockoff that came with those 100 in 1 cartridges). Oh how I lusted at the sight of the Playstation. Our local video store then got some in and started hiring them out, my heart yearned to take one home with me. One afternoon while cruising the magazine section at CNA I saw it, a PCFormat magazine with the Metal Gear Solid Ninja on its cover. I read the entire article right there and then and was convinced that I needed to play that game! My sanity depended on it. So I saved up some coin and hired MGS and a playstation early one saturday morning, then proceeded to play the game for as much of the  24 hours I had it as possible. Well, actually I was kinda forced to, seeing as how they did not hire memory cards making me have to finish the game in one go.

Epic Ninja picture that started it all

So where am I going with this? From that day I was hooked. Let me tell you this, I have never owned a Playstation, but I started religiously buying Playstation magazines. Leaving me with a pile of Game Previews and Ratings but yet no actual Playstation.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Fast forward to 2009 and I was now one year into my  two year Vodacom contract with a despicable HTC S740. Only other owners of S740′s know of the pain I speak of. I choose it because I was unsure, unsure whether I would like a fully touch screen cellphone and would not miss a Qwerty pad. Biggest mistake ever! You might know that the S740 runs with Windows Mobile 6.1, probably the worst phone OS I have ever had the displeasure using. I even dropped the HTC a few times (accidentally) and cracked the screen, didn’t even bother me. Now the outside matched the software inside. My desparation got so bad that I started entering competitions such as WebAddiCTs “Win a Google phone” competition. I started already looking at what my next phone would be. It was around this time that I started noticing people around me having iPhones, and they seemed very happy about their little mini-Mac phone, sometimes even obsessively so. I looked at them and thought “wow, they such Apple Fanboys” but then wondered where this intense patriotism came from. Soon after that I wandered into an iStore and played around with the demo model. It just felt right. I was hooked.

2010
2010 came around and Apple lust started consuming me, I subscribed to RSS Feeds with ipad and iPhone content. I questioned my strange excitement when Gizmodo ran a series for post detailing the iphone 4 that they had “bought”. Then the inevitable, I installed iTunes and started downloading Free iphone Apps from the US Store (Marc Forrest has a nice Tut showing you how). I now have 73 Apps that I have not yet used, all in anticipation to the soon to be released “iPhone 4″. So once again I have media but no actual device. Even scarier is that I am already looking in the mirror and seeing th Apple Fanboy I once mocked. Perhaps only Google with their Android platform can save me from becoming a Steve Jobs slave (but I could wear a black Turtle neck and make it work…).
Below you can see an iTunes Screenshot of the Apps I have downloaded. The iTunes Appstore has a great selection of Games, Social networking and reference Apps but it is an area Google with the Andriod Appstore will start aggresively tackling in months to come. At the moment I still feel that Apple Quality over Andriod Quantity is better, but time will tell as to how this pans out. What makes it hard for me to get a better sense of a Andriod phone is that I cant walk into a Google “iStore” and play with the device. This is an area where Apple is doing well to convert sceptics, like I once was.

Click on the image above to view the larger image

With a week and a half to Steve Job WWDC 2010 announcement where he will show the world the latest incarnation of the iphone I’m looking forward to the following features:
- The new design
- Video Recording at 720p
- Improved display “960×640″?
- Flash for the Camera
-  The Game Centre

The soon to be released iPhone 4th Generation

Oh, I’m sure your noticed the hint in the blog title to a particular Jay-Z song. If you didnt click the link below to watch the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etl9kkIGaHo Jay Z 99
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and come back in a few months when I have cleansed myself from the HTC S740 and will be basking in iPhone awesomeness
-A-