A Kimist with an IPHoNe

I activated my iPhone minutes after my old cell service expired, because I’m too cheap to pay for two services at once. After midnight on the morning of November 21, I began my exploration of the iPhone. The registration and setup was fairly easy with my MacBook Pro providing much assistance. Once activated, I had to experiment with this new toy for a while, so it was around 3 a.m. when I finally went to bed. In the six months that has followed, I have learned a lot about the iPhone, and used it nearly everyday. What follows is my account of the tasks I have used iPhone for and some things I wish I could do with it.

Tasks accomplished with iPhone
Within a few days of activating my iPhone, I found myself near the end of the world at my in-laws for Thanksgiving. I had my trusty MacBook Pro, but no hope of an Internet connection. This posed a significant problem to me because one of the football teams I closely follow was in a playoff game that weekend, but no local media were covering it. With the iPhone, however, I was able to learn of my team’s unfortunate demise. This demonstrates the iPhone’s ability for me (or my students) to retrieve important information (yes, a football score is extremely important) in remote locations without traditional access to the Internet.

On the same weekend in the same place, I received an email message from a student requesting a copy of the review for the exam on Monday. This would have been a problem except for the fact that another student had made a similar request when I was back at home. For the first student, I sent a copy of the review via email from my MacBook Pro. For the second student, I was able to access my Gmail account and forward that same message to him, with the review still attached. This demonstrates a second key ability of the iPhone: to provide or send important information from a remote location without traditional access to the Internet.

Just for kicks the next week, I wanted to see if I could make use of the device in a classroom setting. In my Organic Spectroscopy class, one day’s discussion included the concept of a correlation chart for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Rather than show a copy of a figure from book, I wanted to use the iPhone to display an example of such a chart. This is one example of such a chart. I pulled this up on my iPhone and placed it under the document camera (with a lot of zoom) and demonstrated the ability to display graphical data and figures in a classroom setting. Now, granted, there are easier ways to do this with the correct planning ahead of time. The iPhone is not going to replace my Mac for displaying most presentations, but on the fly, it can fill in, especially if my Mac didn’t come to class that day.

About a year ago, I got a cool new watch that sets itself with radio signals from Colorado. I love that part, but the watch it replaced had a timer, which I used regularly. The new watch has no timer. Another reason I was glad to activate the iPhone was that it has a simple but effective timer function. In the lab this comes in handy when we have to time a reaction or a step in a chemical procedure. This also comes in handy when we have a 30-minute wait at our favorite restaurant. I set the timer and then show the kids every time they ask “How much longer?” This demonstrates the timer ability of the iPhone.

I’m no super saint, but I worship at a church that meets three times each week and I teach a Christian university that values the integration of faith and learning. Whether at church, school, or home, I often want to read the Bible. Several web sites make this quite easy on the iPhone, but my favorite is biblegateway.com, even though it is not yet optimized for iPhone. I can search by book, chapter, and verse (e.g. John 3:16) or by topic or keyword. Typically, I have searched by book and chapter, which also gives me the context for whatever passage we are reading at the moment. Last Sunday, I was comfortable enough with it that I used the iPhone rather than a paper Bible for my scripture reading from the podium at church. Though it went well, looking back I probably should have switched to airplane mode to avoid any interference with the sound system. This again demonstrates a key ability of the iPhone that I mentioned earlier: to retrieve information in remote locations without traditional access to the Internet.

One way the iPhone improves upon the notebook computer is in the ability to retrieve information spontaneously. I teach a summer workshop with secondary science teachers. As part of the workshop, I provide them with new notebook computers. Our facility has wireless capabilities, so the teachers are very quickly surfing the Internet during our meetings. On a daily if not hourly basis, unexpected questions come up regarding the science content of the lessons we are working on, or any other topic. Within two minutes of these questions coming up, five different people across the room will have the answer to the question posed by members of the group. It is this spontaneous ability to retrieve information and answer questions that makes the iPhone so powerful, in my mind. Most of the students in my classes at the university don’t bring their notebook computers to class with them. Some don’t even have one. Virtually all of them have a cell phone and bring it with them. If they all had the ability to use the Internet during class, I can guess that we could take advantage of many of these spontaneous learning opportunities.

In a Bible class at church, someone mentioned the phrase, “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” and attributed it to the Bible. Proving that the phrase is not in the Bible is difficult without an extensive concordance, but with iPhone, I searched for key words in the phrase, and was able to convince myself it did not come from the Bible. I then searched for the phrase on Google and concluded that it was indeed from an extra-biblical source.

My review is continued in Part 2.