Digital Slob: New iPhone will be tempting

No money for food, gas or clothes.

No jobs and no house yet the hottest thing out there are Iron Man movies, Video Games and I-Phones.

QUESTION: For those of us who have no interest in having a phone do anything but send & receive phone calls and take voicemail messages, what impact will these new phones have on our ability to speak to or leave messages with their owners?

In September, 2006, I paid $30 for an analog phone to replace the high-end one which went into the water with me in a kayaking accident over Labor Day and haven't even bothered to learn how to use its texting functions.

This works fine for me now, but what's going to happen as the technologies become more pervasive?

It's been shown that while the initial price of the iPhone has dropped, the monthly fees to AT&T have been raised - in the long run, you're paying even more than if you were to buy a more expensive iPhone today with the old plan. SMART!

It's still dog-slow and Apple has managed to sell only a little over a million units in 13 months. Nokia ships 1 million phones every day. The prediction of 54 million iPhone sales this year is so ridiculous, it's not even funny.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to know where your friends and family are. These new "friend-finding" applications let people embrace GPS. It's saved me big time in sticky situations. I was stranded at O'hare airport last month for 8 hours and no hope in sight for a flight. I checked my Buddy Beacon buddy list and found out that my friend was actually 2 gates away, having trouble with her cancelled flight. We ended up renting a car and driving home. So my GPS-enabled phone saved me big time that day. As far as privacy goes, I know that Buddy Beacon lets you hide your location so that no one can see it but you, that why I prefer that to other friend-finding apps. I'm not sure if Loopt does that or not, though. I know that I'll definitely have the new iPhone in hand on July 11th...or maybe July 12th because you couldn't pay me enough to stand in a line that wraps around the block.