The 10th anniversary of the introduction of the first Apple iPhone being celebrated this week has me wondering how much the Smart Phone has changed our lives since 2007.

It’s true that using an iPhone has opened up an entirely new world of access to information at my finger tips that wasn’t nearly so easy to acquire when computer time was spent exclusively sitting in front of a keyboard attached to a desktop or laptop machine.

I can ask Siri what the current temperature is in Anchorage, or how the Dow Jones Industrial average did that day, and most of the time, I’ll get the information I want in seconds.

The iPhone has eliminated the need for us to have a GPS direction-finding system in our vehicle, and it’s walking directions have even proven to be valuable for me when I’m walking to a new destination.

But we’ve paid for the convenience too.

Because we have connectivity to the outside world in our pocket round the clock, we are expected to be connected day and night. Text messages have too often replaced real people-to-people conversation as a means of doing business and most of us have had at least 1 incident when Siri’s interpretation of what we meant to say totally missed the mark.

Like it or not, the smart phone has become a piece of our day-to-day existence that will only be replaced by something smaller, and sometimes even more annoying.

That’s the way I see it.