The me, myself and iPhone.

• Author: Taylor, Mike

Apple's new iPhone is a pretty neat gadget, probably not up there in value or staying power with the George Foreman Grill, but better on both counts than the last fad that attracted such a frenzy of buyers, the Cabbage Patch doll.

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OK, so I'm not a big gadget fan. Still, anybody who has been in journalism for much time at all has to appreciate these advances in telecommunications--portable devices that let you transmit a story from afar where once you had to dictate it over a phone. Not to mention the Internet, which has enhanced researching and fact-checking capabilities a thousandfold.

Years ago as a sports writer for the Anchorage Times I regularly was sent to cover the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from start to finish: just me, a photographer and a pilot in a little four-seat plane, stopping at every village checkpoint on the trail from Anchorage to Nome.

This was the late '80s and early '90s, the days of rotary phones. Getting stories back to the paper was always an adventure. Sometimes it seemed like delivery via dog team might not be a bad idea.

Sometimes I was lucky enough to borrow a villager's phone and dictate the day's stories. Even back then we did have crude, portable word processors called the TRS-80 made by Radio Shack that had transmitting capability, and I was able to use acoustic "couplers" that fit on the two ends of a phone and enabled the text to be transmitted. Although the slightest disturbance of the couplers would turn the transmission into unintelligible garble, and it would be back to tedious dictation.

Still other times, no phone was available so I'd write the day's stories on sheets of notebook paper and give them to a pilot who was headed back to Anchorage and ask him to drop it off at the paper, which he'd need to do anyway with our photographer's film.

So I, of all people, am not going to disparage cell phones, and certainly not cell phones with Internet capability.

Well, yeah I am.

The last really cool phone for me was Maxwell Smart's shoe phone in the old sitcom "Get Smart." To me, anything since then has been just a telephone.

If the wise Chinese mentor from the old "Kung Fu" series were around today, he'd probably advise, "Weedhopper, be careful that the cell phone you own does not come to own you. Ahh!" For example, if your employer gives you a cell phone and pays for all your minutes, is he really freeing you up, or increasing your hours to 24/7?

I'm no...