My Apologies...

Dear Mr. Jobs,

First of all, I'm so sorry to hear about your health. I sincerely hope that these 5 months off from the day-to-day operations at Apple will allow you to get the appropriate care that you need to ensure a speedy recovery back to the daily grind of the company that we've all grown to love...

Which brings me to the point of my letter. Mr. Jobs, I doubted you. I doubted your judgment when you said that the iPhone would revolutionize the cell phone industry. I did not understand why you thought people would toss aside their perfectly good phones to spend $200-$300 on something new and "pretty". How dumb do you think we really are? I knew that your iPhone was WAY overrated and I wasn't buying your sales job.

Let's back up. I'm a Blackberry user. I love my Blackberry. I'm now on my 3rd model and was making plans to upgrade to another one. I love all of the synching capabilities, the plethora of applications that I can download for it, the web browser, the keyboard - I could go on forever about my love. That is, until Husband got an iPhone.

I put up a fight - "why do you need an iPhone, you have a FABULOUSLY new Blackberry" and "The iPhone is just hype, it's not that good" and "You're going to ABSOLUTELY HATE the onscreen keyboard"... This conversation had been going on for several weeks.

Well, Husband bought the iPhone on Monday and asked me to check it out for him. 3 hours later he had to pry it from my fingers. Mr. Jobs, I take back everything bad that I've ever said or thought about your phone - it DOES live up to the hype. It is NOT overrated. I was WRONG.

So, I wanted to share with you a few things in particular that I really love about it:

• Air Hockey (yup, that's right, it's a FREE game!!!)
• Remote (you can remotely control your i-tunes music from the phone - change songs, change playlists - it does it all!!!)
• Shazam (another FREE application - you can hear a song playing on the radio/tv/movie, hold the i-phone to it, and it will identify it for you - how cool is that?)
• Pandora (you guessed it, it's FREE and you can access this on the phone - I LOVE it!!!)
• All of the other applications - phone, calendar, email, etc.

After just 3 hours of playing with Husband's phone, it was love at first sight and now the iPhone is at the top of my wishlist. Again, thank you for making such a FABULOUS gadget that will waste plenty of time and adequately distract me from adding any real value anywhere.

I look forward to the next big thing that you and Apple have in store for us...

Best Regards, Nandita Keswani Koehler

P.S. If you'd like to send me a complimentary iPhone, I will continue to "sing" your praises to the 3 people that read my blog! I'd prefer the 16GB model! :)

Happy New Year!!! What???

How did that happen? What happened to Happy Thanksgiving??? Or Merry Christmas??? Where did the past 2 months go?

I think I seriously woke up on the 25th and thought "oh, crap, it's already Christmas. i'm totally unprepared..." There's really no excuse for this feeling - it does occur on the same day of the year every year, but nonetheless, I didn't see it coming this year.

We've been pretty consumed with moving (among other things). We spent most of November (early November) packing up the townhouse and then we officially moved in to the new house on November 21st. That was followed by Thanksgiving and a long weekend with the host family in Rochester, NY (coldest place on earth).

I think we were home for about 2 weeks in December before heading to Germany for Christmas. Great time - not terribly relaxing, although vacationing with Oliver never is... but it's always great to hang out with the family and see Oliver's friends who we don't get to hang out with enough.

We came back home on the 29th, spent a relaxing New Year's Eve with our friends Duane and Tracie, and have been getting settled (again) in the house for the past few days.

We're in the market for a big screen TV and a washing machine, so if you have any advice on either, we'd love to hear it... the internet is fantastic until you start finding all sorts of conflicting advice!

Hope you all had a great holiday and we wish you a great 2009! We have a feeling that there are great things in store for us! :)