Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

Today should be known as iPhone day. It’s certainly a mammoth occasion, judging by all the queues I’ve seen lining the town.

The phone was released in a plethora of countries today, and there has been the inevitable buzz of interest and frenzied excitement from fans and eager buyers keen to get their hands on the product.

Yet, take a step back for a moment. What is it, really, that’s so different about it?

Yes, it may look nice, but when it comes down to using it, is there much that sets it apart from competitors – or old iPhone models, for that matter?

There is much that’s wonderful about these smartphones. But when it comes to actually calling, actually using the telephone part of the phone, they aren’t anything special. And you can’t really go wrong to buy digital dect cordless phones instead – if you want to make a phone call that doesn’t disconnect if you hold it in the wrong way, or if you want a good, crisp connection on your call.

Indeed, while there is an array of apps at your disposal with a smartphone that make them handy for work – they still pale in comparison to a computer. Which you tend to have at work more often than not. They are not really phone systems for business, when you think about it – more phones for play. Phones for enjoyment.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that there is a large range of telephones out there that actually telephone better than smartphones, but they suffer from not getting anything near as good publicity.

Unless you’re BT, of course. These BT phones grace our television every day. But I’m with BT, and, well, that’s probably a blog for another day.

I have one of these smart phone gadgets, with all the fancy-but-generally-pointless applications on them, and earlier on today I was fiddling around with a new app; a metal detecting app. I was curious, was wondering whether it works or not.

Because whilst you can waft it around keys or scissors or some other metal object and it seems to do something, it is just as likely to do nothing at all. It is mostly a green bar that fills up when there is something it recognises as metal, or doesn’t fill up otherwise.

And it got me thinking – with the app store for iPhones and Android devices so thriving, is there anything that there’s not an app for?

Apparently the answer is no. There is even an app for translating your baby’s crying and screaming. Allegedly, this app, if you hold it up to your distressed baby, will tell you if it’s hungry, or just plain pissed off.

It sounds an awful lot like my metal detector. And as such, probably doesn’t work. At least very well. But, for all my criticism, there does appear to be a certain amount of research to back up the apps claims. Research suggests, for example, that the pitch and frequency of a baby’s cries can indicate as much as health problems.

Whether it works or not, we’ve certainly come a long way in a short amount of time – it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was fiddling around on a phone that was just a … well, phone.