Maybe it’s just me, but aren’t these newer, multi-function phones with Internet capability, a personal calendar, ICBM guidance systems, etc. too big and boxy? With their rectangular shape and generally black coloring, they no longer resemble a cell phone. Whenever I see someone talking on one I can’t help but think: Hey, it’s a senile person trying to make a phone call using a VCR tape.

“Martha? Hello, Martha? Blasted phone, I can never get it to work. Batteries aren’t dead, the window in the back shows I still have two more hours of tape left.”

The good thing is, with all the iPhone features, the owner won’t have time to make calls. From what I’ve seen in the ads, owning an iPhone is like taking on a full time job.

For starters, there is the Internet, which studies have shown is impossible for most people with online access to ignore. It is the cyber version of crystal meth. People hooked on surfing the web actually have withdrawal symptoms if they quit cold turkey. Having the Internet available on a phone is the equivalent of installing a keg and beer tap into the car of a repeat drunk driver. It’s going to get used. A lot.

When not surfing the web, people will want to use their phone to listen to music. Last fall, when my son bought an iPod, I was convinced that this was the world’s single greatest invention of all time. Perhaps I was a little over exuberant. Now that I have had time to reflect, I place the iPod no higher than the third best, after indoor plumbing and antibiotics.

Why was I so excited about the iPod? Well, I grew up in the era of the vinyl album. Forty minutes of music was contained on a Frisbee-sized piece of plastic that would develop scratches in the mere presence of air molecules. When listening to music, we handled our albums as if handling priceless artifacts. We would carefully remove the disk from the album sleeve, gently place it on the turntable, spend the next ten minutes applying an array of cleaning solutions using special cleaning pads to remove all dust and debris, then once the needle touched the record’s surface we would stand perfectly still, breathing only as necessary, convinced that any motion whatsoever would cause it to skip.

So, yeah, the iPod was an improvement. I assume the iPhone continues this same musical tradition. And from the commercials it appears you can even look up your songs by flipping through virtual album covers that are shown on the iPhone screen. I will believe that feature actually works when I see it, however.

When not surfing the Internet or listening to tunes, what you want most to be doing with any cell phone is, obviously, taking pictures. I don’t know about the iPhone, but in general cell phone picture quality is rather poor. If you ever wondered why, ask yourself this: What sort of cell phone service do you think you’re going to get from a Canon Rebel?

Fortunately, cell phone picture quality is not all that important. My experience has been that most pictures taken with a cell phone are of the rather stupid variety or otherwise of embarrassing situations that ten years ago would have thankfully gone unrecorded. This includes people making funny faces, people having a bad hair day, those who are drunk, etc. In other words, we use cell phone cameras to capture the type of subject matter that Ansel Adams steered clear of.

Lastly, the iPhone has this exciting feature of a screen that flips orientation when you turn it sideways. Therefore, if you wish to view something that is wider and not as tall, you can simply turn the phone 90 degrees and the screen flips to be viewed in that direction. To get an idea how neat this feature is, the next time you are using your home computer try tipping the monitor on its side. See, everything is now sideways. But if it had flipped orientation, that’d be awesome, right?

In short, there are two things that I can say for sure about Apple’s new iPhone: It will revolutionize how we work, play, and are able to ignore other people when in public places. And, as with most technological advances, I won’t be getting one anytime soon. Heck, I still have my old turntable.

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