This is a post that takes a slight time out.
It’s also a post that confirms why Boing Boing is a daily read for me, as something interesting always turns up. Such is the case with Joel Johnson’s review of the Android-powered G1.
Gadget reviews – especially of the iPhone – of are easy to come by (incidentally, there are a ton over at Test Freaks). But, what could have been just an ordinary hardware and feature run-through, is instead a meditation on the relationship we have with our personal technology. Here comes a quote:
When it comes to owning, using, or reviewing a gadget, there are really only two states: love increasing or love receding.
Products are not simply loved or hated, but appreciated over time on a scale which terminates with perfection at one extreme, failure to operate at the other. That scale can be broken down in any number of metrics, all of which are useless: what matters to the owner of a product is not where a reviewer, a single sample, has chosen to mark his opinion at an arbitrary point in time on the scale, but in what direction that point is heading. (And to a lesser and murkier degree, for how long that trend will continue.)
What’s lost in the review — the direction of love — is critical. Like romantic love, a slide towards increasing love helps us overlook flaws, remember only the best aspects of our products’ features, and gives the relationship between a product and its owner time to flourish and grow. Hidden delights will show themselves after a time, reinforcing the relationship, even as unaddressed incompatibilities might, after a measure, begin to tilt affection towards declination.
I think what Joel is saying is that reviews are, at best, an opinionated snapshot. What makes a gadget the absolute best for one person will rule it out for another, and the usefulness of your chosen device will wax and wane over time.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that the perfection of the uber-gadget is unattainable. Similarly, if you spend all your time on Please Fix The iPhone, and are just concerned with the inabilities of the device you’ve bought, then perhaps that device is already waning in your affection. Mind you, that does give you a chance to buy something newer and shinier 
Anyway, if you read one review of the Googlephone, I’d recommend Joel’s.
Thanks for reading, and normal opinionated service now resumes.