iConverge

Although the iPhone is kind of old news, it is a great example of all popular modern technology converging. The iPhone is the beginning of an era where people can communicate, be entertained, be informed or do whatever they want to at all time with just their phone. It combines almost everything you can imagine.

Putting the internet in the phone adds hundreds of different ways to communicate. People can access their beloved facebook, myspace, twitter, flickr, and the list is endless. You no longer have to be at a computer to do all these things.

Then the iPhone adds maximum entertainment. Not only can you watch and listen to the 8 gigs of multimedia you own, you can conveniently press your YouTube button and watch days upon days of good, homemade entertainment. If that doesn't do it for you, you again have the internet, so you can browse endlessly for more entertainment. And then finally, if you want the "real" entertainment, you can just go to the local iTunes store, conveniently accessed by one tap of the screen, and buy almost everything you want, more and more every day.

This is only a piece of what the iPhone does, and if it isn't enough for you, you can hack into your iPhone (which Apple is trying to shut down).

But Apple has produced an extremely innovative device that will alter the path of technology, even if it's not where they want it to go. Throughout history, not even since the birth of the internet, people have been putting their heads together and coming up with ways to use new technologies to their benefit. The internet has seen tons of innovations, some brilliant, some illegal, but most useful to a large crowd of people.

Who would have thought ten years ago that people would be sharing millions of hilarious home videos on a device a fraction of the size of a book? In ten more years, convergence will bring extreme changes that we can't even imagine, but the iPhone will have affected it. To me, who needs to pay that much for an iPhone plus $60 a month ($720 a year!)? In the spirit of the internet, and with the internet's technology (of having almost everything freely available), I think technology will follow soon with a much cheaper option of doing all of this.