[Geek Alert…]

I bought my iPhone yesterday morning, after hemming and hawing over it for…oh…about 38 hours.  38 hours being the timespan between the moment one of my friends showed me his iPhone, and getting my hands on one of my own.  For some time now I’ve been waiting for that all-purpose cell phone/music/email/entertainment widget to appear on the market and I figured the iPhone would be it.  But I wanted to wait a generation to let them work out the bugs.  Then I had a chance to get my hands on one and I realized then that I’d been thinking about this sort of device all wrong.

Last Wednesday I’d been invited over to a friend’s condo in Washington D.C. for the annual fireworks show.  From John’s condo you can see the Mall fireworks nicely.  I stopped by my friend Jon Larimore’s place beforehand, where he and his boyfriend Joe were waiting to spring the trap on me.  "Look at what Joe bought me," says Jon happily as I walk in the door.  He’s holding out his iPhone.  Joe had walked into an Apple store the day before and bought two, one for himself and one for his other half.  A few hours later we drove over to John’s condo for the fireworks.  Our usual Friday happy hour gang showed up along with some of his other friends.  The crowd was mostly gay computer geeks, a subset of gay you won’t generally find in the movies they show on Logo.  Everyone swarmed around John and Joe’s iPhones like bees to honey.  I couldn’t blame them.  The moment I got my hands on one, my fingers just didn’t want to let go.

They are sweet little gizmos.  The touch screen user interface is the candy that attracts the eye, but what attracts the imagination is how it brings together several different threads of information technology into one device, and right away you can see ways in which they relate that you didn’t before.  The one thing a little gizmo can do to win my heart is show me something I wasn’t expecting from the technology, but which in retrospect I should have seen coming.  In the case of the iPhone, believe it or not, what it was, was the integration of the wireless networks, the address book, and Google Maps.  Suddenly I had a map of the whole goddamned world in the palm of my hand and it could tell me exactly where everything in my address book was located, from where I was standing right then, right that moment, if I wanted it to.

The iPhone doesn’t have a GPS unit built-in yet, but I can see that coming down the road.  Still, if I need to see where I am on a map in most urban zones I can just walk up to the nearest door, read the street address off it and plug that into the iPhone and get my location on a map back.  Then if I want to know where a certain place is from where I am I can plug that address in, perhaps from my address book, and I get back a map with path lines and a set of directions.  Or if I just want to see what’s in my general vicinity I can scroll around the map with the touch of a finger or two.  If I’m planning on driving somewhere, a few touches here and there and I can get a traffic map of the area.  Two fingers can zoom out or zoom in on just about any iPhone display with simple, obvious, pinching or expanding motions.  The user interface is sweet.  The screen is made of glass, not plastic, and the entire unit feels solid to the touch. 

James Burke once said that data isn’t important.  What’s important are the connections between the data.  My old Kyocera Smart Phone linked my Palm address book and the cell phone in a way I thought was useful.  So when I decided to get the iPhone I migrated my Palm data into the address book and calendar applications on Akela, my Mac Powerbook.  Then I bought a .Mac account so the address book  and calendars on both my Macs could sync up with each other, and then the iPhone, even when I’m away from home.  (The only major gripe I have so far with the iPhone is that the note taking applet doesn’t let you sync your notes too.  I really need that.  But I can wait for it.)   So now I had the links between my address book and the iPhone established.  To that I added links to my two household Macs, and the web too, since a .Mac account allows me to view my personal data from anywhere, and share selected bits of it with others.  Then yesterday while I was at Jon’s house, Jon showed me how you can tap on an address and the iPhone will bring it up on Google Maps.  Seeing how that worked I realized that there wasn’t any reason now, why all my personal data can’t be linked in some way to the general storehouse of information on the net, and that those links could tell me things about my personal world that I hadn’t seen before.  

We had our usual happy hour last night, and I and another friend, Tom, brought our brand new iPhones along.  You have to picture this little clutch of gay geeks walking into a gay bar brandishing iPhones as we chat with each other.  Later that evening several of us were driving together out of D.C., chatting about this and that.  The conversation strayed to books we all wished we’d had the time to read and Tom, asked me if I’d ever read a certain mystery writer.  I said I hadn’t and tried to tell him about another one whose books I’ve just loved over the years and I had a brain block and for the life of me I could not recall that writers name at just that moment.  So while we’re all riding down the highway I start tapping away on my iPhone.  I bring up Google and do a quick search on the names of two of this writer’s characters I remember, and I instantly get a page of search results back that tell me the name of the writer.  That took me maybe thirty seconds.  Then a few more miles down the road the conversation stayed into singers and sentimental songs and Vera Lynn and how you never hear those deeply felt sentimental ballads on the radio anymore.  I mentioned a favorite of mine from my teen years that I hadn’t realized until recently was about the Vietnam war and Jon asked me who had composed it and once again I got a brain block and just couldn’t remember the name of the composer.  A few taps on the iPhone later and I had it.

There’s a story I’ve heard the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke tell.  He was trying to make a point about space exploration, but I think it makes the same point about any emerging technologies.  Suppose, he asks, you could go back about 500 million years and ask a reasonably intelligent fish why fish should bother trying to colonize the land masses.  Fish breath and live in water.  Air is a dangerous place for fish to be.  Colonizing the land would be costly and difficult.  But this particular fish, being a reasonably intelligent and progressive member of his species, might be able to give you many, logical, sound, progressive reasons why, despite all the hazards and cost and difficulties, fish should try to colonize the land.  It might tell you that in learning to colonize the land, fishkind would learn more about how to take care of the seas.  It might tell you that all sorts of new technologies would be invented along the way that would benefit the lives of fish.  It would never have thought of fire.

So…last night I rode down the highway with some friends, looked at the iPhone in the palm of my hand, and I beheld fire.  There are other devices recently that have tried to put all these technologies together into one hand held device, but they’ve been really awkward to use, or at least I’ve found them so and I’m someone who never had trouble programming a VCR.  In the iPhone Apple has brought everything together into a seamless whole and now suddenly you can see a horizon before you that you never expected:  what life is like when the answer to anything you want to know is literally in your pocket.  As time goes on other companies will probably take the hint and start designing these devices to be more then simply cell phones with some extra widgets tacked on.  The phone part of the iPhone may end up being the part of it I use the least. 

[Edited a tad…]