iPhone oh iPhone. How do I love thee. Let me count the ways.
You can make phone calls on it, and very cheaply, almost free. I remember when I had a mobile phone in the 90s and it was attached to my car. Phone calls cost $.70 each and that’s just for a minute. Then I got a flip phone for cellular service, Still on the analog network but cheaper to call with. I finally graduated to the iPhone in 2007.
I started with an iPhone four, but upgraded eventually to the SE model five. I’m still with that model although I bought a reconditioned one recently from eBay. What I like most about it is that it fits in your pocket, as opposed to later models which are more bulky in my opinion. And I don’t think you give too much up in performance with this one. It’s great that it still has the mini plug on the front so you can plug in headphones or external microphones. They dispensed with that in later models, Can buy a dongle that will contain it and plug into a charging spot.
The iPhone is in my opinion the Swiss Army knife of handheld computers. Sure you can make phone calls with it, and the rates are so low that you can almost call that part of it free.
You can make video calls with it, with more options than you can believe. FaceTime, Google meets zoom, WebEx, duo. I mean the list goes on and on. And most of those are free.
It has a very respectable camera even at this level. It will shoot good stills, bursts, and video. And a large enough storage, 64 GB will guarantee you won’t run out of shooting time.
It’s a radio, using the various apps like tune in radio, radio.com and iHeartRadio. A fantastic app is called Radio Garden. Like the others it’s free and you can listen to stations all over the World by just clicking on little White dots on the world map. You can zip from Great Britain to New Zealand with just a tap. News and music from all over the world, and insight into different cultures.
It has a great texting feature, allowing users to communicate with others with great ease. Of course, we might be bringing up a generation that texts instead of talks. But that’s a philosophical issue, not an engineering one. Emailing of course is nothing new now, but they do give you proof of what you have said in a cyber conversation. Just be careful what you write.
Surfing the web with a smartphone is like opening a world of resources. Just about any question can be answered almost immediately. Think about the day when you had to labor over encyclopedias, dictionaries or other references. You won’t be spending time in the library rifling through books and magazines and filling out index cards with material to use for a paper.
It’s a ship spotter, a plane spotter and, if you look up in the sky anytime you will find what constellations and stars are there. Not all apps are free but I haven’t found any really expensive.
Of course it’s a shopping service, where you can research what you may buy and then order it online. And of course it has a Compass and Google maps to guide you to your destinations.
Yes, smartphones will do just about anything for you other than pulling, pushing, dragging, lifting or digging. That’s up to you.
You don’t have a smartphone? Has anybody seen a telephone booth lately?