Got an iPhone. One of the first gen (discontinued) 4GB models, but still a device capable of triggering gadget-drool.

And honestly it's worth it -- the user interface, the touch screen, the web, map and video applications are paradigm-breakingly good, and I keep discovering new shortcuts and cool nuggets the deeper I go.

But technology should move ever forward, never back. I had a touchscreen PDA back in 2001. Here are three things I could do easily with my Palm IIIc that are impossible on the iPhone:

1) Write on the screen
2) Cut & paste text
3) Sync docs from the handheld to the desktop's word processor

If you're a writer, this completely borks the iPhone as a writing tool. The lack of cut & paste alone is a fatal flaw.

The Palm IIIc was like a lil' notepad -- I wrote the majority of Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Characters using my fingernail. Sure, it was Graffiti -- which was a bit like Tolkien's Elvish runes -- but once you learned it was as smooth as writing on paper. And, unlike paper, you could move sentences and text blocks around, then drop the whole file into Word when you were done without having to retype it. Communities like Writing on Your Palm sprang up to share tips and tricks.

I've admittedly been annoyed by many things lately, but losing this functionality after buying the most advanced device on the market is a real downer. My bus-stop writing tool is still a spiral-bound notebook.

Dan
(writing projects and current releases)