That New-Technology Smell

Is there anything better than a new computer? You crack open the packaging and… there it is. Full of promise. And absolutely Un-full of data, temp files and any kind of virus or spyware. People come by and congratulate you on your acquisition as if it was some kind of a real accomplishment.

I finally bought an iPhone. A while back, there were lines in front of Apple stores and AT&T outlets, as FanBoys from coast to coast waited for the first telephone to feature Apple technology. I wasn't one of those. The phones were expensive and slow and since I couldn't do anything with my phone but make calls, all of the other Magic Stuff didn't really mean anything to me. I didn't miss it, so I wasn't attracted to the iPhone. But over time, the TV commercials wore me down. How cool would it be to hold your phone up to a radio and have the phone say "Aimee Mann: Freeway" when you wondered what that song was? And more than once, I found myself looking at a house with a FOR SALE sign in the yard and wondered how much they wanted for it, saying "You know, if we had one of those iPhones, we could check their web site and see how much it was, how many bedrooms, etc."


So we got phones, my wife and I. iPhones. They are just $30 a month more than the plan we were on with another carrier's Family Plan and that is just 50¢ per day, for each of us. Fifty cents, or if you prefer, fitty cent gets us the e-mail and ease-of-adding-contacts and the GPS features and all of the rest of it, and we're already severely happy.

But it's not without pitfalls. I figured out how to synch my phone with my computer, but when I tried to synchronize Kathie's… well, she now has access to my e-mail, calendar, contact list and more. It would seem that an investment in a good book on the mysteries of the iPhone would not be money wasted.

At some point, I hope to carry, instead of my cell phone and my iPod, only an iPhone. And I expect to get better and better at running it, learning all of the tricks and Way-Kewl things it can do for me.

I completely understood only my very first cell phone. It was about six inches long, by an inch and a half by maybe three inches. It probably weighed three or four pounds, which felt like Real Value. It stored, I believe, four numbers. Maybe six. It made or it received calls. That was it. There was no calendar. There were no alternate ringtones. There was no camera. There was no headline news. There was no Yahtzee game. There was no satellite navigation. If I wanted to know where the local coffee shops were, I had to call someone from the local area and ask. That was the last time, though, that I completely got my cell phone. I know one thing above all else, concerning my new iPhone. I am already much farther along its learning curve than I have been in nearly twenty years.

A craftsman, the saying goes, is only as good as his tools. That often sounds to me like something Tim Allen's Tim Taylor character would tell his wife as an excuse to get the latest and greatest new gadget to hang on the pegboard at home. But one thing is true. Today's technology is vastly underutilized. Did you know you can make your fonts bigger by holding down your [Control]-key and spinning your mouse wheel? There are hundreds and thousands of features buried in our computers and our software that we don't know about and thus get no benefit from.

I've got some time off this holiday weekend. I hope to spend some of it with a few manuals, learning to do more with what I already have, rather than continually spending on the Next Big Thing. But damn, I really do enjoy this new phone.