You will read, in issue 302 of PC Plus and on this website in due course, about my complete abandonment of principles. About how I threw away my previous insistence on clinging on to a luddite phone, and upgraded to the shiniest smartphone possible. I have an iPhone. You’ve heard the joke, I’m sure: “How do you tell if someone has an iPhone? They tell you.” Yeah. That’s me now. I have an iPhone. Did I mention my iPhone? Yeah.
One of my closest friends has called me a sell out. It’s the friend with the normal phone, not the one with the iPhone. I’m surprised I still hang out with old Captain Normal Phone now that I have an iPhone. ‘Norm’, I call him now. ‘Normie’. He did it with tounge firmly in cheek, I hope, although as an iPhone owner I can’t be totally sure any more. I find it hard to relate to things which aren’t iPhones.
While it’s true that mere weeks before I had been extolling the virtues of the pre-camera Nokia handset I had been carrying round — 6 days battery life! It just works! — I wouldn’t call it ‘selling out’. ‘Shelling out’, perhaps. But I don’t care. I have an iPhone.
And then, last night, I discovered a horrifying fact. My iPhone (I have an iPhone, did you know?) and my wife’s iPhone (bought days after mine, I suspect so she could tell people she had an iPhone) WILL NOT LET ME SLEEP.
1am. My iPhone buzzes because a friend is trying to contact me on eBuddy, unaware that I am in fact tucked up in bed trying to sleep. I ignore it. Stupid iPhone.
3am. My iPhone dings to tell me I have new email. SHUT UP, IPHONE. IT IS 3AM AND I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THAT BIT OF BLOG SPAM AT THIS TIME.
5am. Wife’s iPhone loudly plays the text message tone to inform us both that she has successfully cross-bred a mountain Gorilla and a Water Buffalo to create a Minotaur in ‘Tap Zoo’. Wife does not wake up. I do. I fling my eyes open in panic, realise that it was TAP FLIPPING ZOO and not the sort of emergency that would necessitate me being sent a text message in the middle of the night, and slump dejected back into bed.
5.01am – 7.30am. I lie, fuming, attempting to get back to sleep after having my tenuous sleep pattern disturbed by the chirruping of an electronic git. I drift off into a dream where I loudly admonish my poor wife for playing such a stupid game in the first place — a game which demands money with menaces if one of your animals gets ill — and feel thoroughly guilty for doing so.
7.31am. iPhone alarm goes, the sound of quacking ducks. I am already awake. I check the internet (on my iPhone, which I have, did I tell you?) to find out how to switch off inconvenient middle-of-the-night notifications for Tap Zoo, only to find that such an option is TWO VERSIONS AWAY. Mid-November, they reckon. WHAT.
I don’t know how this is allowed to happen. In the office this morning I consulted Linux Format’s Paul Hudson, author of several popular iPhone games. He doesn’t know how this is allowed to happen either. It is a requirement of Apple’s servers, I’m told, that the option to switch off such notifications be present in the settings screen. [Edit: "the messages all go through Apple's servers, so it should be Apple's responsibility to make them disable-able." -- Paul Hudson] In the case of Tap Zoo, that option is not there. Perhaps Apple has made an exception given Tap Zoo’s ludicrous popularity? Ooh. Politics. I’m a right Ben Elton, me.
My problems probably stem from the fact that I am accustomed to using my phone as an alarm clock, so am unable or unwilling to simply switch off the sound. This might have to change. I will admit that the first two wake-ups were my own fault. I should have shut off those notifications myself. In the future I will, manually, every night before going to bed. In the morning I will manually switch them back on, cursing the fact that the iPhone (MY iPhone, which I still love despite my boiling rage this morning) does not include an “I sleep between these times, be sensible and automatic and don’t send me any push notifications you ridiculous burbling noisebox” function. That would seem to make sense to me.
But Tap Zoo? Tap Zoo has got to go. I wonder what it will take to convince the other half to abandon her improbable clutch of Giraffe eggs?