Cutting the cord (metaphorically): the iPhone on vacation proves friend & foe

Recent iPhone ads have touted the utility of having the iPhone on a trip. Vacationing with the iPhone is a great convenience, but also makes it harder to vacation.

Using the quasi-GPS and Google Maps, being able to make dinner reservations, forsaking tour guidebooks and printed itineraries it great. On a recent long weekend to Hawaii, my friends and I discovered and confirmed the utility of the iPhone features on the road. So much so, we didn't even bring our laptops, which is a big deal for some of us. Really, it is. The only physical complaint I had about the iPhone was getting sunscreen and sand on it. The only user-interface issue: dragging and dropping the "pin" in Google Maps as it sometimes got tripped up and I wished for some "reset" function to clear out all the locales we looked up.

In a larger sense though, at one point, I kind of wanted to throw my iPhone into a pineapple patch or a volcano (there were road closures do to hot lava flows). But while the iPhone is touted to merge phone, camera, iPod and PDA. Doing so, however, makes it hard to truly disconnect and unplug - spam emails follow you, work emails come too. Sure, this is true with any phone or mobile device. But doing so is both liberating and daunting as it takes me a particular amount of will power to switch off my phone and to keep it off for an extended period of time. Imagine a knight without their sword, a politician without their teleprompter (or morning talk show hosts on SNL for that matter).

Switching off the iPhone, I think requires oo much effort to think about it on vacation by my book. But there are times for serenity and calm, however. the horror!

Anyway, I say this all as we still await the SDK package, meaning we may get Exchange server emails and endless applications that make us even more reliant on the iPhone.

[mreiher]

I have also found the iPhone to be my new best tool when vacationing or traveling on business. All the things you mentioned about finding restaurants, directions and such are spot on... the iPhone makes this sooo easy. I cant tell you how many times I would search for something like "Italian" with a city name and it would pop-up all the restaurants in the area. Show me how far they are and I could call ahead with one touch of the finger for reservations. Most of the time, I could even find reviews of the restaurants without much trouble. Very sweet! As for the email thing... I did find an answer to that. I would set up an out of office email on my server before I left and if on vacation... I would either never touch the Mail icon or just turn off that mail profile by adding some symbols to the front of my account log-on that way it can't connect to my work email. Simple and painless.

[vocaro]

"do to"? I think you meant "due to"

[gbukgb]

Is it too much effort to read your article one last time before posting it. There are several typos that need fixing.
Honestly, if you are going to write an article, check it twice before you post it!

[richkirk]

Heck, when I am on vacation, I just sync my iPhone setting the email accts to exclude the work email acct. I also forward my office phone to my iPhone when I'm out so NO ONE knows my iPhone's number.

[modthocn]

On a recent long weekend to Hawaii, my friends and I discovered and confirmed the utility of the iPhone features on the road. So much so, we didn't even bring our laptops, which is a big deal for some of us. psp game downloads