iPhone 3G

When we were in California visiting my sister, Lori and her family in early August, Terri and I became exposed to the new iPhone 3G. Yes, I make it sound like a disease and that's intentional. This phone is a disease. I can't get rid of it.

First, I played with Lori's phone several times while we were there whenever I could actually pry it from her hands (she had already succumbed to the iPhone disease). She had such excitement about this phone, and it was quickly spreading to both Terri and me. The phone is incredible and basically works like a handheld computer with internet access. Programmers are going nuts developing applications for the devices making them even more amazing every day.

Here's a not-so-brief summary of how I'm using it so far. Calendar, contacts, email, phone, internet, iPod, GPS Navigation, camera, watch, alarm clock, texting, weather update, photos, entertainment, blogging, remote control, flashlight and the list goes on and on and on.

The "Maps" application that came pre-loaded on the phone actually gives traffic indications based on other iPhones GPS traveling along the routes being shown. If traffic is moving fine, the road is green, if slow - yellow, if really slow or stopped - red. I mentioned flashlight, there is an app that simply turns the screen white, I loaded the app the other day (it was free) thinking you never know and sure enough, we were at dinner with friends the other night at BJ's at Oxmoor and the lighting was so dim we actually used it to read our menus.

"Sportacular" is a free app I loaded and have used to track my "favorite" teams very easily as well as all the sports scores and stats. "Pandora" is a cool free app that takes a song you like and builds a playlist that complements that song. These songs don't even have to be in your library.

"Shazam" is another free app that will actually "listen" to a song that is playing in the room, the car, on TV, in a movie, etc. and identify the song for you, the artist and send you to iTunes if you'd like to buy it. Today we were driving in the car and I seriously couldn't think what song was playing on the car stereo and used Shazam to ID it. It worked!! The boys were so impressed, so was I.

This phone is seriously incredible. Everyday we find new things that it is capable of doing. My sister calls it her "Jesus phone". That may sound sacreligious but I'd like to think if Jesus were using a cell phone, this is the one he'd have, this phone is nearly a miracle worker.