Sometimes even when you’re looking for the future, it still manages to whack you upside the head when you least expect it. Let me explain.

This is, not surprisingly, a story about the iPhone.

Last week, like thousands of other Canadians, I stood in line for the new 3G iPhone. I live in Hamilton, so it was a short queue, but one thick with fanboy sweat and early adopter adrenaline.

Quick recap. The 3G iPhone is a mobile computer/phone developed by Apple. Because it has cell phone capabilities, it’s being distributed in Canada by Rogers. Unfortunately, Rogers has done the job with all the social grace of a chubby high school nerd who finally scores a date with a cheerleader and then takes her to a strip club and suggests she hop up on stage.

The first data plan prices and three year contract for the iPhone were so archaic, onerous and insulting that it was as if someone, months ago, had walked up to a whiteboard and written, with military finality, “How can we make everyone hate us for offering them the best cell phone on the planet?”

It was only after 50,000 plus Canadians signed an online petition that Rogers got the message that maybe they might want to offer plans at least within a bus ride of the ballpark where the rest of the plans worldwide hangout.

Anyway, when I got iPhone home, I packed it full of the new applications that are filling the virtual aisles of Apple’s Apps Store. As I said, the iPhone is really a small, mobile computer and can run extremely robust applications using a version of OS X, the same operating systemApple’s desktop and laptop computers run. One of the applications I downloaded is called Shazam.

Which is why, a few hours after getting the iPhone, I was holding it up to my bedroom radio, which at the time was playing a song from a Toronto jazz station. Shazam uses the microphone on the iPhone to “listen” to a few seconds of a song you hear on the radio, in a coffee shop or, God forbid, an elevator. Then Shazam analyzes the tune and lets you know what it is and who’s singing it. So, I held the phone to the radio and let Shazam listen for a dozen seconds.

You know what?

It worked.

It was the Cassandra Wilson tune “Lover Come Back To Me” and, when Shazam identified it and displayed the “Loverly” album art on the screen of my phone, the future made a sharp, loud whack on the side of my head.

Think about it. Here’s this handheld wireless device that can listen, process a sound file, send it via a high speed wireless connection to a remote server somewhere which can then match the digital audio snippet against a library of popular music and beam back the result to some guy holding a phone up to his bedroom radio.

The same device gives me access to the Web, acts as a GPS unit, pulls down Internet radio, take pictures, plays games with 3D graphics, sends and receives emails, pumps video and music, is a great phone and, yes, allows me to write this column on it with a virtual keyboard.

When science fiction authors invented the future 20 years ago, this was the device they imagined. Arthur C. Clark once famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Tell me that a cell phone that can nail a jazz song and singer in 12 seconds cold isn’t magic.

So I think, despite Rogers best efforts, despite the lines, despite the activation delays and headaches, it’s worth stepping back and taking note. Whether you want an iPhone or not. Whether you lined up and were successful or not, devices like this are now among us (the upcoming Blackberry Thunder, for example). And, to me, it feels like the computing age has finally, really begun.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...