Someone Call Shyamalan

The Setting: I'm thinking we need a movie where the cell phones take over the world.

I saw something about this on TV a while back and I just read about it on the npr blog. You can load this software called Shop Savvy to your iPhone or your T-Mobile G1, and it allows you to use the phone's camera to scan the barcode of a product in a store. It then displays the cheapest price for that product and lists reviews from people who have bought the product.

The blog posting also mentions the Shazam application, which allows you to hold your phone up to a TV, car radio speaker, etc and the software identifies the song that's playing and displays a link where you can download the song. Apparently, it only works with a recording of the song; it won't work if you try to sing it (especially the way I sing).

I saw a commercial about this other technology beginning around Thanksgiving time and there is info about it on the Time magazine site. You can use your iPhone, T-Mobile Google phone, or even your Nintendo DS to download recipes and use the device as an interactive cookbook. The Nintendo DS even responds to voice commands.

I know this is just the tip of the iceberg; there's a lot of other cell phone technology out there now and some other things we haven't even heard of yet. For example, I think it was last year I heard they were working on technology where you can scan a movie poster in a movie theatre lobby and then see the preview on your phone. I wonder if that's already available? Anyway, this is all pretty cool stuff.