Rusharound

I recently told all of you that I wasn’t going to buy an iPhone. That pledge doesn’t prevent me from visiting the iPhone nursery every now and then to check in on my soon-to-be-older-siblings-of-my-future-iPhone. Today I visited with a specific mission: to see how well the device works with my beloved Gmail account.

I walked in the store, found a lonely little demo machine and pressed the mail button. This brought up a screen with large colorful Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL icons. I pressed the Gmail button and quickly entered my details. Instantly, 25 of my most recent 2,000 emails washed over that perfect gigantic/little screen. I scrolled, read, probaby giggled a little and imagined my happy life with the next generation iPhone. When Sarah nudged next to me and I heard stomach growl for lunch, I reached for the log out button. That’s when the problem started.

There is no log out button.

I tried the arrow (re-check mail), the other icon (compose mail), and the last one (folderlist) — but there is no way to log out! I even pressed the “home” button and re-entered mail — but again, no way to log out. While emails from Bank of America and and another from “American Cowboy” (long story) remained stuck to the inbox that I couldn’t remove, I motioned to a sales associate for help.

When Apple-staffer-Rob came over and heard that I had put my account information into one of the demo phones, the situation looked worse: “You really put your account details into a public demonstation phone?” he asked. (Er, yes. That’s why I want to log out of said public demonstation phone.) He took the phone and started deleting emails one by one. When he got to the third email, I politely showed him that he had 1,997 more messages to go. Rob called over his fellow apple sales buddy Todd.

Neither of them could figure it out.

I wondered if I would have to buy the damn thing just to protect my identity. They wondered if they would have to call the night crew and ask how to they reinitialized the demo phones at the end of each day. Twice Rob interrupted his strategy sessions with with Todd to explain that the phone really is easy to use, especially if it’s connected to a full sized computer. I nodded with a “that’s good to know” look.

This went on for the entire afternoon and into the middle of next week. Well, that’s what it felt like, standing there while the guys dawdled over my exposed inbox. Eventually, one of them found a separate preferences window – and the long-sought-after Remove Account button. As soon as I confirmed that the phone could no longer access my cyber jewels, Sarah and I made a break for it before Rob could start in on his ‘ease of use’ speech.

Disaster — and iPhone purchase — averted (this time).

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.