I reserved an iPhone with my mobile-phone company as soon as it became available in Croatia. That was about a month ago. The closest I could get it was Rijeka, but I go there very rarely, if at all. Thus I placed my reservation with a store in central Zagreb. This morning I went to pick it up, but it took me only a few minutes to realize the whole thing made little sense for me. Actually, it made no sense whatsoever.

I expected to pay a bit more than two-hundred pounds sterling for the new gadget. An Apple product fan, I was quite ready to dish out that much money. But it turned out that I would have to pay almost twice as much because I have the cheapest contract available with the mobile-phone company. The more expensive the contract, the cheaper the iPhone, of course. Given that I use the text-message service almost exclusively, switching to a more expensive contract made no sense for me, either.

The most attractive feature of the iPhone was the ease with which I could connect to the World Wide Web. To my Residua, to be a bit more precise. But the price made me think about this feature. Both in Motovun and in Zagreb, a computer connected to my website is always within a walking distance. Why would I pay anything at all, let alone a small fortune, for the vaunted connection? By the time I was walking out of the store this morning, I was back in my standard anti-gadget mood: “iPhone, schmiPhone!”