Smart phone

I am not much of a gadget-geek. As long as a gadget does what it is primarily meant to do, I do not care for bells and whistles that come attached to it. Thus, for the longest time, my cell-phone did exactly one thing and did it well: it was an excellent mobile phone. It had a great signal, clear un-garbled voice and good battery life. It had neither a camera nor a mp3 player. In other words, it belonged in a cell-phone museum. But I was extremely pleased with it.

AT&T finally got fed up and sent me an ultimatum asking me to upgrade my phone - they were no longer going to even support the technology my phone was on. Sigh! Oh well - I upgraded to another phone with good reviews for voice-quality and battery life. The camera and mp3 player on it were basically a joke though. No problem, I use my canon and my ipod for those purposes anyhow!

Last year, I bought an iPhone for S as a gift. S is not much of an Apple fan though and re-gifted the phone to me after a couple of months of use. I was annoyed at having to give up my beloved no bells and whistles phone. But hey, you don't keep an iPhone lying around with no one using it.

Thus, I started using the iPhone. Initially, what I loved about it was the in-built GPS. It worked so well when we concocted plans on-the-go to visit a previously non-visited destination - just google the address and feed it to the map application - nice! The next draw was the availability of so many good apps for free. I went into app-overload mode for a couple of weeks. Then I began loving the ability to check weather/stocks/email anytime, anywhere.

iPhone, how do I use thee? Let me count the ways:

1. I set the alarm for the morning wake up call and also use the snooze function extensively.
2. I set up appointments and reminders on the calendar.
3. As soon as I wake up, still lying down, I check personal email on it - reading email from family is a nice way to begin the day.
4. Checking and replying to work emails when I am supposed to be on-call off-hours is such a cinch.
5. I love,love,love the maps and GPS functionality.
6. I make shopping lists on it.
7. LoseIt is an awesome app for tracking calories.
8. I carry it to work-meetings and fiddle with it when things go too off-topic (no one knows that you are not using the phone to check work emails >B-))
9. I use it to listen to music.
10. Occasionally it has served as a stand-in camera when I miss bringing along the real camera.
11. Locating restaurants in a new area is so easy.
12. So is browsing for vetti things like what the "Congress-created dust bowl" sign you spotted on the highway means.

Oh, I could go on and on and on. I realize now: A smart-phone is one of those things that you do not miss having in your life till you have owned one.

However, I do have a gripe - the iPhone mostly does not have a strong enough signal and the voice quality sucks. Really, would that be too much of a requirement to ask of an i-PHONE?