Wherein you will be instructed in one-upmanship techniques to seem better off for not having an iPhone, including ways to make the iPhone early adopter feel like a bit of a git.

As a gadgeteer, folk have been asking me why I don't have an iPhone yet. Many of you may be suffering a similar annoyance. Here are some ploys I have developed (pace Stephen Potter, author of the brilliant One-Upmanship) which will reliably make you, the person without the iPhone, utterly dominant.

Just between you and me, we both know the real reason we don't have an iPhone: We are too poor. A little family money, and this would be a very different article. I have a child in college, and have to write a $13,000 check next week. I'm not about to pop $600 plus an extra $30/month for a device that replicates, albeit with style and élan, two devices I already have - my Motorola V360 cell phone with T-Mobile, and my Palm TX. But I'll be damned if I'm going to start whining about paying bills vs buying toys. That's a loser's game.

One-upmanship is a fine art, and I do not mean to minimize the difficulty of doing it well. Remember: The point is not to give a pathetic excuse for why you don't have an iPhone, but a stout reason for having rejected it - implying, of course, that you could have bought one, but decided not to. Properly done, you will make the other party feel like a cretin for owning one.

With fads such as this, even technically sweet fads, your job is that much easier, for they will not be able to disentangle the good reasons for having one (mainly, 'tis a bonny thing), from the bad (I am a sheep, I am a pathetic status-seeker, I find people scary so I must seek solace in inanimate objects).

Here then are a few positive answers that will leave you one-up:

• Tell you the truth, I'm kind of over it, now that it's available
  
• Hope you're keeping your old phone around, because you'll be sending your iPhone back for a new battery after your 1-year warranty has expired, but before your 2-year contract is up
  
• I'm waiting until they have an iPhone dock for my Segway
  
• Without GPS it's really kind of, you know, lame
  
• I do a lot of calling from the car, and I need voice dialing or, at least, tactile feedback so I can keep my eyes on the road
  
• It doesn't have a Bluetooth A2DP profile for listening to music with wireless headphones (note: this one is particularly effective, as nobody knows what it means)
  
• Ramen noodles cost 20 cents a bag. Assuming you eat ramen noodles for lunch and dinner, that's more than four years of food
  
• Family plan costs $30 a month extra, not the $10 you expect - read the 5pt type in your AT&T contract
  
• Thank god I don't need to be writing emails all the time, and, if I did, a keyboarded phone, like a Blackberry, would be a lot better
  
• The browser sounds really nice, but until we have city-wide free wi-fi, it's just another hole in the Internet into which you throw money
  
• I used to be with Cingular/AT&T, and my bill was wrong every single month. I spent, swear to god, an hour a month on the phone with Customer So-Called-Service; in fact, my family had such a bad time, we got out of our contract without a penalty
  
• AT&T sucks big giant dick

These are just serving suggestions, as they say on the box of instant mac & cheese. I'm sure you can come up with more, and I would love to hear them. Feel free to leave them as comments below this article, or email me at peterbasch@la2day.com.

So, enjoy your Ramen noodles and your outdated RAZR, and confine your web-surfing to when you're at your dead-end cubicle job!

Peter Basch

Another recent report you might also like: "Momma's got a brand new laptop".