The Best Toy I Ever Owned

I've always loved toys. It's just that I have progressed from buying them at a toy store, to buying them at a hardware store, and eventually an electronic store. Now I'll say that the best toy I've ever owned is my iPhone.

The iPhone came on the market in June of 2007, and it wasn't the first smart phone with the ability to access e-mail and the Internet, but I do believe that it and the other smart phones that have been coming onto the market recently have the potential of changing society almost as much as the Internet has done over the past 15 years.

I've only had my iPhone for a couple of months, but it has changed the way I do so many things, and if I don't have it attached to my belt, I feel positively naked. Now I can read my e-mail wherever I happen to be. And I can resolve almost any question (definition of a word, location of Vilnius, the cast of "Lawrence of Arabia," etc.) from wherever I am. And that's only the beginning.

I'm not going to buy a GPS system for my car because the iPhone has built-in GPS, and I can get voice-assisted directions and locate businesses around me with my on-board software. I can even plot my progress on a map as I bicycle the streets of Roseville (and track distance traveled and average speed).

There are some 100,000 applications in the "App Store" on iTunes, and most of them are either free or cost just a dollar or two. Most iPhone aficianadoes have lots of games on their phone: I don't have any. It's not that I don't enjoy a game now and then; it's that there are too many useful applications to explore, and I feel as though I'm just beginning to learn the conveniences that are now at my disposal.

I don't listen to the radio in my car any more: I plug my phone into the car sound system and listen to exactly what I want to listen to -- without commercials. And it's not just real-time listening: if I miss "Morning Edition" on NPR, I call up the NPR app and play the current day's program at any time of the day -- as if it were recorded and just waiting for my summons (which it is).

I can download any of tens of thousands of books (classics are free) and read them on my iPhone without having to get something like Amazon's Kindle. My personal calendar, plus weather, stock market data, sports scores, and news stories are right at hand. I don't need an iPod or MP3 player because all my music, plus videos, are right on the phone. And yes, call quality is excellent.

This is clearly the electronic version of the Swiss Army Knife.

Expensive? I wouldn't say so. You can get refurbished iPhones for $50 (and the standard 2-year contract with AT&T). And although I've heard that some pay $30 per month for their service, mine is just $24.

Considering how much I use the iPhone, it has changed my life (for the better, of course), and in time (and not that much time), competent phones -- really hand-held computers -- will be changing the lives of a significant part of the population of our country and the world. For me, it's great fun to be participating in this change.