iTechnology

For years, my family somehow managed to make the yearly drive to Chicago and back to visit family without the aid of technology. It’s really not a complicated route; from Oklahoma City you drive to St. Louis, then to Joliet, and then hang a right until you hit Grandma’s house.

I got my first GPS unit in the fall of 2003, one that connected to my laptop via USB. From that point on, all my road trips involved running a laptop in my car. And laptops need power, so I bought a power inverter too.

As time went on I’ve become more and more addicted to e-mail, and soon our trips to Chicago involved me pulling over from time to time and searching for open wireless signals in order to check my e-mail. (This was years before places like Panera, IHOP and McDonald’s were offering free WiFi.) I remember one particularly frustrating and annoying trip where I probably added an hour on our drive time by pulling off the highway multiple times in search of a wireless signal, no matter how weak. I specifically remember thinking at the time how archaic this would probably seem in five years. It does.

By 2006 most of the major rest stops along the route had added free wireless, although for me it was a moot point by then. Thanks to a PCMCIA Sprint cellular modem, I was given the gift of continual connectivity. I remember how neat it was, the first time I logged on to IRC to chat with my friends from the passenger seat of our van.

I think it was our trip in 2007 in which I actually had two laptops up and running in the van, one for the GPS/Navigation software and the other for entertainment (music and movies), plus surfing the web and checking my e-mail. Again, I remember thinking that technology hadn’t quite caught up with my needs yet. I just wasn’t sure how the story was going to end.

I think it has ended; introducing, the iPhone.

I know I arrived late to the party, but I’m amazed at how much this little thing has infiltrated my life. I had a Samsung Blackjack II smartphone for two years, but it wasn’t like this.

At my worst with two laptops running in the car, I was able to listen to music and watch videos, access the Internet, and use the GPS. Guess what? I can do all of those things on my iPhone now. I have apps for almost everything I do online: I can update Twitter, check Facebook, search Craigslist, read my e-mail, and even update this blog from my phone. Although I have a portable GPS unit in my car now, I have a GPS unit on my iPhone as well. On my phone I’ve got around 20 gigs of mp3s (more than enough for any road trip), but if it weren’t, I can stream mp3s from my home server using Simplify. The ability to snap pictures and send them to Facebook where they can be viewed by friends and family almost real time is just amazing. My kids take it for granted and some of you might think it’s “neat”, but … it’s hard to explain but, I’ve been waiting for these days my entire life.

The iPhone is no replacement for a desktop computer (not yet, at least), but as for dragging along a couple of laptops along for a road trip … I think those days may be over.