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If you’re like me, you think that the iPhone is actually pretty neat – but way too expensive for what you get. The reason I never went the iPhone route was because of the cost of the plans, the cost of the handset, and until a couple of years ago, because AT&T was the only carrier I could get one with.

iPod vs iPhone - would you pay nearly $3000 more just to make phone calls?

iPods turn out to be cheaper. A 32 GB iPhone and iPod retail at the same amount: $299. But the iPhone requires a 2-year contract for it to be $299. The handset without a contract is $799 – and without a phone contract, it’s useless. If you pay $100 a month for an iPhone contract, (which is about average,) your iPhone ends up costing you some $2700.

An iPod Touch, on the other hand, does everything an iPhone does except place calls and SMS messages. It can go online via Wifi, in exactly the same way an iPhone can. Wifi is almost always faster than a cellular data plan anyway, so you’d be doing this even with an iPhone whenever you could get away with it.

What’s more, you get access to the Apple app store just like you do with the iPhone.

Of course, you are going to need to take care of your phone issue separately. Since there are so many contract-free companies with cheap monthly talk plans, this is easily solved. In fact, if you’re more adventurous, you can get an inexpensive smart phone plan, jailbreak your iPod Touch, and tether the two together. Then you wouldn’t even need Wifi hotspots to take your iPod online – you’d just need your other phone to be nearby.

I do not understand why anyone pays so much for a phone just to play games or watch movies. It is an insane waste of money to pay so much for what is ostensibly a toy. But if you want to get on board with all of the development being done for the iPhone, this is a much cheaper option.

These are some of the things I’ve been hearing from people for the last 16 or so hours since Steve Jobs died.

I’ll keep adding to this as I continue to get more interesting (read as: weird) takes on the death of some guy I’ve never met:

“I wonder how long it will take until they discover he actually died last week, and they kept him in a freezer until AFTER the Apple Product Announcement? I mean, what are the chances of that?” – My Girlfriend

“I called in yesterday, and [co-worker] told me, ‘Steve is dead!’ And I thought, like, who’s Steve?” – Co-worker

“See, I think they found a way to graft his mind into the iOS system – so that when the next update comes out, Steve Jobs will be in every device, and will then be able to take over the world from beyond the grave!” – Okay, that one’s me.

“Apple will do fine, until they unveil iRadio or iStapler in a couple of years.” – Someone on G+

“What about Apple putting a Samsung Galaxy S2 into an iPhone case then calling it ’4S?’” Person on G+ responding to that last person on G+

“The reason the new phone is ’4S’ is so they can then say it’s the new iPhone – ‘for Steve.’ I don’t know if it is masterful, or skeevy.” – IT Guy

“It’s not that some famous person died. It’s that someone hugely successful died at only 56 that bums people out. Because if that’s possible for him, it means none of us are safe. We can each get our clock punched at any time.” – Me again.

“Yeah, but pancreatic cancer is a big deal. You don’t get to string your life along like that UNLESS you have Steve Jobs money in the bank.” – Co-worker

“Whatever you do, keep your mouth shut. You always end up saying something really crass when people die. The way Apple fanboys are, you’ll probably get lynched.” – My Girlfriend, before I left the house this morning

In case you were hoping for a way to block Facebook Questions from your account, you can’t – thanks to the typical enthusiasm for the ideas they’ve chosen to steal all by themselves, Facebook won’t allow you out.

Facebook Questions

Facebook Questions, if you haven’t already used it, is a simple way of polling your friends. It’s a good idea actually, one that several thrid-party developers had already created, and millions of others had been using.

The problem was, as is the case with most third-party Facebook apps, you had to give it permissions to access your profile. Many people weren’t comfortable with this. So when Facebook created its own feature, it effectively killed using any of these third-party solutions.

The one real benefit of a polling app not made by Facebook is that you can block it if you want to. If you’d rather not receive them on your Facebook Wall, or have them sent to you, you are out of luck. Facebook considers Questions as integral to their experience as Photos or Events.

The big difference being I can prevent individual friends from sending me Events. They can be blocked easily enough in my privacy settings. Not so with Questions. The only solution for keeping someone from sending you a Question is to unfollow them.

One thing you can do keep these notifications from being e-mailed to you:

1. Go to your Account Settings.
2. Click on the “Notifications” tab.
3. About halfway down the page, you’ll see the notification settings for Questions. Start unchecking boxes!

If you’re a marketing manager for a huge corporation that has no views on its YouTube page at all, you may be wondering, “Hey – how can I get some of that YouTube magic to rub off on me?”

Below are four video commercials on YouTube for the Sony Ericsson Xperia phone, starring Kristen Schaal.

These commercials are funny, short, and frankly anyone with talent could have made them (if only talent were easy to come by) because there’s not much production to them.

Now, it’s very likely your corporate communications strategy won’t let you do things like this in anything, much less a video available on YouTube.

That’s why you CANNOT get some of that YouTube magic to rub off on you: Because your corporate blah-blah-bladity-blah is dedicated to bland content. The company line is that you love being completely boring so much you want to marry it and have its goddamn babies.

You don’t suck by some freak of nature – you suck on purpose. And no amount of professionally produced advertising is going to change that.

If you want to be noticed on YouTube, you are going to have to up your game at least as much as what appears above.

I’m just sayin’.

If you think Charlie Sheen is a maniac who can’t keep his mouth shut, you’re probably right.

But he may be the first person in history to make that work for him.

We’ve always had celebrities go crazy for our entertainment, of course – Britney Spears, Mel Gibson, Margot Kidder, Anne Hache – but each time one of those people flipped out the story was spun so we could understand that they were either under “incredible strain,” or that they were receiving help. They disappear for a while, then return months later with a comeback of some kind.  (Mel Gibson being the exception, as he seems to think it’s so much fun he does it over and over agian.)

Charlie Sheen, however, seems to be the first A-list celebrity to take his scandal by the horns and say, “Yes, this is me – if you don’t like it, too  bad.” Say what you want, but it is incredibly brave. Rather than try to appease a public fast to condemn him, he makes no apologies for himself.

It’s also incredibly smart. With the number of PR responses to so many other scandals like this, the public is jaded. If he had taken the advice of his former publicist and announced he was going into treatment, laid low, then did a mea culpa on The Oprah Winfrey Show, I doubt anyone would have noticed or cared.

It would have blown over, but he would have kept the stigma of it. Do you really think Britney Spears isn’t still batshit crazy? Do you think Mel Gibson doesn’t still hold resentments against Jews?

The result so far of Mr. Sheen’s strategy is astonishing. His various interviews of rambling, bizarre quotes. He admits to drug use, though he isn’t using now. (He took two drug tests to prove this and passed them both, though the tests used could only go back 72 hours. Make of them what you will.)

He has gone on Twitter, and reached 1,000,000 follwers faster than anyone in the history of the site. His hashtags – #tigerblood, @planbetter, and the enigmatic #winning, have been trending topics since he started. It’s safe to say he owns Twitter now.

Rather than just let things fade from people’s consciousness, he’s ridden the tide. The brilliance of this is he now controls the message about him. Even if that message is, “wow, what a nut.”