A Roadmap of iPhone

The first person I know who uses an iPhone is Shirley. It was year 2006 and Shirley was the marketing manager of a Fortune 500 company. She's a beautiful lady and takes pride in the fact that she could and she is willing to consume a reasonable level of self-indulgence. One day she showed us an iPhone that we have only heard of before. She had asked a friend to get it for her from Hong Kong, it was not available officially in China yet. It looked nice with the sliding view under her slender finger.

 

Only two months later, we sat in together in a meeting with a PR agency, they were three girls and two of them use an iPhone too. It was funny to watch three identical iPhones lying on the meeting room table. What's more, the two PR girls are only some junior staff in their twenties. Shirley looked dampened and almost awkward coz once she laid out her iPhone, there's no way to retrieve it and hide it.

 

To make things worse, only three months later, Shirley's own assistant also got an iPhone as a gift from the boyfriend. Shirley didn't wait for more humiliation on her iPhone, she left the company soon.

 

By the end of year 2008, iPhone has become essentially a "Street Phone" as we call it in China (a name for the most popular mobile phones coz you go to the street and everybody you see uses such a phone). Our regional sales manager, a successful woman in her 40s, sports an iPhone too. Let's call her Cindy for convenience.

 

In December, our company was having an annual meeting in Shenzhen, the major production base of the world's electronics and naturally, it also hosts the most famous markets for counterfeit mobile phones in the country. In the afternoon when we arrived in Shenzhen, Cindy went to the famous counterfeit mobile phone market with some of her team, a dozen or so sales reps in their late twenties. I also went along in a spirit of a tourist and speculator. The market is stuffy and a full of people, a feeling of temptation, chaos, entrepreneurship, salesmanship, free economy hanging in the air, everyone guarded their backpack or handbag with a high alertness. We went out after two hours and the twelve-person group bought eight counterfeit iPhones and a few others in total, the cost is around RMB800, about one fifth of the real model.

 

Cindy was not very flattered by the new acquisition of her team. She proclaimed "I can't use my iPhone anymore". Coming back from Shenzhen, she did have her phone changed into NokiaE71, another big Street Phone of 2009.  

 

Then as of last week, I also become a proud user of iPhone personally. And that's because I went to an industry conference and everybody is busy typing to their smart phones and I feel I've become obsolete without one. More so, people talked a lot about mini blogging and it's said the mini blogging of Sina has already 6 million users and some famous celebrity was making a sensation on Sina sitting in the Paris Fashion Season, sending pics to her mini blog. That sounds cool, I thought. That's how I have finally adopted into iPhone and I made sure I didn't use it until I bought a pretty cover which I think is unique enough.