Collegiate Times

iPhones, equally envied, beloved and detested, are the Duke Blue Devils of smartphones.

Those who embrace the device (and accept Apple’s Big Brother-esque control over its content) do so passionately and proudly. To them, it’s less a phone than a life accessory. Those who don’t — well, they’re not shy about it. The backlash against the iPhone is loud, fierce and only slightly irrational as far as hating consumer products goes.

What is it about Steve Jobs’ last invention that drives people batty? After all, no one engages in online flame wars over competing brands of microwaves. Even stranger is that this anti-iPhone zeal seems to disappear when talking to people in person.

While some prefer other brands, it’s rare to run into fire-spitting message board warriors. Do they actually exist? Or do most people agree that the iPhone is just a cool gadget and not a personal statement?

I’d finally learned the lesson that movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Terminator” and “The Matrix” had been trying to teach me: Machines can’t be trusted. Armed with this newfound weariness of my beloved gadget, I decided to venture onto campus to get human perspectives on the smartphone debate. Overjoyed to be talking to beings with emotions and faces, I quickly gathered the opinions of 29 Virginia Tech students.

The results appeared to be a microcosm of national smartphone preferences: eight interviewees owned iPhones, nine owned Droids, three owned BlackBerrys and nine did not own any type of smartphone.

Students offered a variety of reasons for their phone of choice. Vaibhav Batheja, a senior industrial systems engineering major, appreciates the versatility of his iPhone.

“I can have all my music on there conveniently; it’s like an iPod,” he said. “I like the style and the aesthetics.”

Sam McKinley, a freshman university studies major, said he was loyal to the iPhone brand because of its accessibility.

“It’s easy to use, easy to understand,” he said.

Several Droid users, including Marissa Cullen, a freshman management major, pointed to the hard keyboard — as opposed to the iPhone’s touch screen — as a major part of their decision.

“I like that it has keys versus just a touch screen, and it’s a little more hearty than an iPhone. I can drop it, and it won’t break,” Cullen said about her Droid Pro. “I’d probably stick with Droid.”

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A version of this article appeared in the Dec 7 issue of the Collegiate Times.