Wet and Wild: The iPhone is Genius [Part 5]

Movies, TV and More

Okay, I never thought there would be a chance in hell of me loading a movie on the iPhone, until my wife saw my hopping around on my surgically-repaired tendon and, thus, judging me fit enough, dispatched me to take one of my boys to scout camp. Since I sleep only five or six hours a night, I needed some entertainment to fill in the hours between Colin crashing, and my dropping off point after midnight. So I bit, and downloaded The Bank Job onto the iPhone. It took only a couple of minutes to pass the movie from iTunes to the iPhone. I purchased this movie, but many are available for rental. The rules for rented movies is that you have 30 days to initiate watching it after download, and once you start, you have 24 hours to complete it or it self-destructs.

I sat outside the tent in the pitch black after Colin had crashed, and even the mosquitoes had dispersed. I slapped on my Bose headphones, plugged into the iPhone, and tilted the iPhone on its side. The accelerometer in the iPhone knows when the phone has been tilted, and moves the screen 90 degrees each time you rotate the phone.

So, how good can a movie be on a screen about 3.5 inches diagonally? Well, pretty good it turns out. Remember, you’re holding the iPhone about eight to 10 inches out, and the picture is quite crisp and clear. The movie is rendered in widescreen format, and the sound is astonishing, though I did worry that the Bose noise-canceling headphones would drown out the footfalls of an approaching bear or mountain lion (one of the latter had just snuck into a house a few miles away through open French doors and snatched a golden lab for a midnight snack, then leaped over a six-foot fence with little effort (see www.9news.com/rss/article.aspx?storyid=97099). But, perhaps the amount of insect repellent I had doused myself with was a bit cloying on the pallet of the beasts? Maybe my body was polluted with an overdose of bon bois²? Whatever … the movie experience was nothing like I expected, and a very nice way to pass the time.

2. James Bond in Goldfinger, commenting on a disappointing brandy: “I’d say it was a 30-year-old fined and indifferently blended, with an overdose of bon bois.”

Part 1 – Intro, aka Technical Swimming Talk
Part 2 – Biding my Time
Part 3 – i-Day
Part 4 – Worth the Wait?
Part 6 – Surf’s Up
Part 7 – Conclusion