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.

It is amazing how far technology has come.

Norwich called yesterday (I had heard about a particular shop there, but I also just wanted to look around). It’s a few hours away from where I live, so was a day trip. The kind of day trip that’s one point brave and two parts foolish: I had never been there before, had no idea where anything was, and – since I was getting the train there – it came with a very real risk of getting lost.

Thankfully, I didn’t get lost. Every bit of that is down to my phone, which has Google maps on it, and a tremendously useful GPS.

It’s with phones, much more than anything else, I think, that this James Bond-ish quality of the modern technology really comes into its own.

Of course, there are some things that business and office telephone systems can do better. There are some that can do all sorts of ridiculous things – much more than the simple offering of broadband. And that’s another mark of how far technology has come.

It’s a little bit like the tech that the new BT television systems are offering: TV on demand, and some I’ve seen are even offering 3D capabilities, that sort of thing. And if the movie experience in the cinema is anything to go by, that is going to be something worth keeping an eye on: I remember being forced to blink and move back slightly when objects were flying out of the screen towards me, the other day.

But smartphones are still the thing that impress me the most. What they can offer you in something so small, stashed away in your pocket is quite frankly mind-boggling. Most of it comes down to internet on the go. It is the stage for everything else to build upon.

It’s not like that mobile broadband you can get, where you shove a usb stick into a laptop, and tend to battle with fluttering, unstable connections and tediously slow speeds. It’s easy. It’s simple. It’s automatic.

And there is a beauty in that. I think I’m more impressed with my mobile than I was with my first Panasonic digital cordless phone, which was a bit of a lifesaver, if you recall.