My phone used to stink.

It was the kind of cell phone that was only slightly smaller than the one shown above. It made and received phone calls, and that was about it.

As weird as that sounds, it would’ve been weirder for it to do anything else back then.

It did have one other feature, though. Sort of. It was the humble beginnings of a technology that would revolutionize cell phones forever.

My giant, hulking, mess of a phone was able to receive text messages. But for reasons I will never quite understand, it was unable to send them. I’m not sure why, but that’s the way it was.

And it gets even worse. When I received a text message, my phone had no way of displaying who it was from. I would literally just get a message.

My friends who knew about this would screw with me all the time, sending me messages like “Hey” or “Call me right now” because they knew I was completely in the dark as to who had sent it.

That was when text messages were free, which was also around the same time that you had to ask your friends if they were even able to receive text messages. Imagine that.

Over the next five or six years (that’s three upgrades in phone speak) more and more features were added to the standard cell phone.

I always took whatever phone was free with my upgrade. “Why do I need to pay for any of that other stuff?” I wondered out loud to no one.

The new features arrived quickly. First, it was a color screen. Next, it was a camera. Then it was games and internet access.

And then those features were upgraded even further. The quality of the camera people were carrying around on their phone started to eclipse the quality of the actual cameras people owned. The slow internet connections that people were using got faster. The games you could play got better, because there were online stores offering a lot more.

Eventually, even dopes like me who refused to pay for a new phone enjoyed the benefits of the upgrades. We might not have had a phone with a camera until 2007, but when we got it, it was awesome.

Shortly after all of that, cell phones starting doubling as MP3 players. Any gadget that you could conceivably carry was being mashed into a tiny device that fit in your pocket. It was crazy.

I looked at my cell phone the other day and I was amazed at the things I could do with it. I could get the weather, check my email, do complex math, find the name of a song I was hearing by pointing the phone at it, cash a check…CASH A CHECK! I mean come on, that is some crazy, futuristic stuff right there!

I could also transfer money, manage a fantasy football team, get directions via a GPS, find the closest Chinese food restaurant, buy clothes, DVDs, movie tickets, etc., check into flights and scan barcodes.

And I could replicate the sound of a vuvuzela.

If that doesn’t blow your mind, well, nothing will.

Of course the most fascinating part of being able to use my cell phone to do just about anything is the one thing I don’t use it for: making phone calls.

Go figure.

We’re basically carrying our whole lives around with us in this little magic brick. While there haven’t been any conclusive studies about constantly being so close to the invisible rays our phones transmit, it makes me wonder: will future generations look at us holding cell phones the same way we look at Barney Rubble holding a cigarette?

I can see it now: “Look, they have little kids holding cell phones right up to their ears!”

“Ah, hush child. We didn’t know how bad they were for us back then.”

Awesome.

I should start a “no cell phones at the table” rule one of these days. And not for my future children. For me. Jeez.

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