Out with friends and last orders have been called in the pub. The alpha male of our group pulls out a stack of taxi numbers scrawled on old business cards.
None of the firms is close enough. "Richard has a new iPhone - let's try that," my wife suggests. I pull up an app called AroundMe, which tells me where the nearest cab company is.
Thirty seconds later and the taxi is on its way. My friends look on in envy and admiration. Alpha male looks despondent. "I am part man, part computer," I tell myself
Some might ask what all the fuss is about. After all, downloadable applications appeared on some cellphones such as the Palm Treo almost a decade ago, so what's different now? The short answer is that the old apps were not particularly good. They were either difficult to download or time-consuming to master, so few people used them, says Gerard Goggin at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who has studied the sociological impact of the iPhone (Continuum, vol 23, p 231).
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