So what is this thing called again?

I got an iPhone this week. I hadn't intended to; I was just waiting for something that I thought would be a noticeable upgrade over my prior phone, which was a 3 year-old original Droid. That phone worked very well. It was just very slow on the data end. So I got the iPhone because it had a fast processor. Plus everything else in my house is Apple, so why not my phone.

So far, with my new phone, I have created task lists and shopping lists, listened to music, gotten directions, checked train schedules, played solitaire, received and sent text messages and e-mail, and a played with the voice controlled stuff. Can we spot the obvious omission?

I've had the phone for 4 days now and have not made or received a single phone call. In fact, I don't even know if the phone part of the thing works. The other kinds of messaging things I've done have made it unnecessary to make phone calls. So I've used my phone a lot, just not as a phone.

This makes me think of two things that I said about mobile phones, one while I was working as a marketer in the early days of cellular phones, and one of which I said several years later when I first got my oldest child a cell phone. They both sound kind of stupid, but put them together and it all kind of makes sense, not that I knew that at a time.

Back in the late 80's when cellular phones first burst onto the scene, most people know they were big and heavy and inconvenient to carry around. In fairly short order, this began to change. At around the point when there were finally phones you could put in your pocket, I said to the guy running our cellular biz, "You know when this business will be really big? When you don't have to carry the damn phone around with you." In the early 00's, when deciding what phone to get for a child, we decided, "The purpose of the phone is to make phone calls, not to play games on," (this was a HUGE concern to parents at the time).

So here I am, carrying around this thing that does so much more than could have been imagined back in the 80's. Now, one could be excused from thinking small at that time, 5 years or so before the World Wide Web had been invented. We knew the cellular had data transmission capabilities, but at the time we were deciding whether it made more sense to have messaging devices be separate from the phone. Nobody thought of transmitting data as a major thing in any aspect of life or even business.

But in a way, I was right 20 years ago. I'm not carrying a phone around with me, at least not in the traditional sense. I'm carrying a computer that makes phone calls. It's a thing to play games and a whole bunch more. And as an advertising person, what's really interesting to me is that we still call it a phone, when the telephone part of it is almost an afterthought. We've redefined what the word 'phone' means.