The lightning started just as the players were getting ready to come back onto the field.  In Ohio this means a mandatory thirty minute wait before the game can continue.  Each time there was lightning in the sky, the half-hour clock restarted.  At home I would have checked the local radar to see what was coming.  I had my cell phone.  I decided to call someone that I knew had access to the Internet.

I had to make a couple of calls before I found someone who wasn’t at a football game.  The radar showed we were on the south edge of a storm, but a bigger storm (two counties wide) was about fifty minutes behind the one over us.  This one was going to be nasty.  The weather service said it would include heavy rain and hail.

The referees have a box in the press box.  Any time there is a lightning strike within fifteen miles, an alarm goes off.  They didn’t have access to anything else.  They thought the storm was almost over, so they continued the game.  We left.

Within half an hour it hit.   I talked on the phone with some people that stayed behind.  It was an ugly scene.  No one was struck by lightning (thankfully), but there were some injuries on the field stemming from the sudden change in field condition.

If someone in the crowd could have used an iPhone to check a radar map (and show it to the referees), we could have avoided this storm and all the fans and players could have been inside when it hit.  I will watch the news tomorrow to see how things ended.

My first impression – it is smaller than I thought it would be.  For some reason I expected the whole thing it be bigger… smooth, like an iPod, but bigger.  It’s probably just the advertising that Apple has done, making it appear larger than life.

Once I touched it I was impressed.  In the 60 seconds I messed with it, everything worked as easily as it was advertised.  I flipped through some pictures.  Did the two-finger zoom.  I then used a browser to open a page and do the zoom thing there.  The connection was slow, but I have heard that from other people… a feature of EDGE.

I didn’t make a call, so I don’t know how the device handles the task I would use it most to do.  That’s the thing.  The iPhone is a phone.  It does a lot of cool things, but it’s a phone.  I wouldn’t want to carry something as big as an iPhone around with me all the time.  I have a RAZR.  It cost me $10.  It’s compact and it has great sound/voice quality when I use it to make calls.  It has a lot of other features that I barely use… because I use it as a phone.

If you travel all the time and need to get on the web, the iPhone may be worth the expense.  $600 is a lot to pay for a phone when you can buy a much more powerful laptop for the same amount and get a 14 inch display to boot.