So I don’t have a Kindle, and I don’t want one. For some reason I’m predisposed to dislike it. When I try to articulate my reasons, though, they feel as irrational as any other prejudice, so I won’t embarrass myself by trying to share them.

The Kindle has virtues for sure. It seems like a great way to take a lot of books on vacation. It saves paper and therefore trees. On net, it’s a green device, even when you factor in the materials and manufacturing.

Having said that, there are some rational, non-prejudicial reasons to dislike it…

It’s ugly. To me, the Kindle already looks like a cool gadget from ten years ago – like those candy-colored iMacs from 1998. And the display makes everything look like you’re seeing it through the window of a Greyhound bus.

Typography. I’m a bit of a font geek, but I think it should bother everyone that the Kindle uses one font for everything. I hear the Kindle DX has native PDF support, which I assume includes fonts, but I also assume it – like the Kindle 2 – uses Monotype Caecilia for everything else. It’s hard to imagine reading the New York Times in such a robotic looking typeface, but the bigger issue is that fonts are carefully chosen. They signal something about the contents of a work, just as body language and clothing signal something about a person. You can tell just from the typography of a movie poster, for example, whether a film is serious, funny or frightening. Fonts are like the clothing of a written work.

No backlighting. Really? This is a battery-powered device, but if you want to read in bed without bothering your partner you need to clip a book light onto it? When I learned this about the Kindle I could not believe it.

No pictures… or terrible pictures. I hear the DX has made some improvements here over the Kindle 2, but in any case the device doesn’t do color, so things like infographics and many kinds of illustrations are simply rendered useless.

You can’t lend or borrow. I love the public library, and I love having my own library. One of the things I love about having books in my house is being able to give them away to people. By the same token, I love it when a friend hands me a dog-eared paperback she just finished and says, “you have to read this.”

Yep. I’m happy with the ancient, tree-killing version.

Whenever the conversation turns to Apple, there erupts a certain amount of troll vs. fanboy squabbling. Usually there are a few would-be referees in the mix too, telling everyone to shut up because the topic is worn out, or pointless, or both.

And so it has been lately with the iPhone App Store saga.

Nonetheless, I’m going to give the dead horse one more kick in the ribs.

In my last post, I linked out to some of the recent indictments of Apple on other blogs (Factory Joe, Calacanis.com, GigaOm, TechCrunch). In the comments of these posts were many devil’s advocates (the devil in this case being Apple), and the defense seems to come down to three main points:

1. Apple has always been closed, and Steve Jobs has always been a control freak, but it’s precisely because of this that Apple has had such a track record of quality and success.
2. The iPhone and the App Store are actually awesome. Seriously, the thing is sweet, and there are like a gazillion apps for it. Stop whining!
3. It’s really AT&T’s fault.

There’s certainly truth in all of these, but they ultimately leave me asking, “what is an iPhone, really?”

When Apple was just a computer company, and the Woz was still around, Apple catered to geeks and hobbyists, because they were the people who bought computers. Steve Jobs saw the future early, however. He knew that computers would be a mass-market product, and he helped make it so. He made it so by deciding (or understanding) that a computer should be like any other piece of consumer electronics – like your stereo or your tv. Most people don’t want to program those things, they want to play with them.

Apple took this philosophy to another level with the iPod – a bona fide consumer electronics gadget. No more, no less.

And now, there’s the iPhone, a product that is so firmly somewhere in-between (plus, a phone). And therein lies the problem…

Steve Jobs has always tried to have it both ways. He wants Apple to be the best computing platform on the market, and he wants Apple’s products together to make up a sexy, plug-and-play personal electronics ecosystem.

When you look at it this way, it’s surprising how well he’s managed to make this work.

So, what about the iPhone?

If the iPhone is a little computer, then I expect it to be open and infinitely customizable. Anyone should be able to make any kind of software they want for it, and I should be able to buy the software wherever they want to sell it. Furthermore, it should connect me to the Internet and all that the Internet offers.

If the iPhone is a personal electronics device, then first and foremost I expect it to be plug and play. It should be super easy to get my media onto it, and the experience of consuming or interacting with that media should be fun and easy.

If the iPhone is a phone, then well, first and foremost I expect the supreme suckage of the phone company. I expect to be able to make calls and send texts and get monthly bills that I don’t understand.

The problem of course is that the lines between these things are getting fuzzier and fuzzier. People are either satisfied or dissatisfied with the iPhone depending on which of these three perspectives they favor.

I tend to favor the idea that my iPhone is a little Macintosh computer, so I get cranky when I can’t install a different web browser or get rid of the stupid Yahoo! weather app.

But I also think it’s an awesome little gadget for listening to my tunes and my stories, and I appreciate the gazillion apps I can get for it.