For the past three years, I've had a Samsung i500. I love it. It packs most of the Palm functionality of those Treo smartphones into a usable phone form factor. In other words, it looks like a phone, but it has everything a smartphone has: Palm OS, internet connection, a stylus, etc. I've always had a flip phone, and I can't figure out why anyone would want something that is otherwise.

The best features on my Palm are the applications I have purchased for it. The Palm OS 4.1 software comes with a program that will sync your Outlook mail, but I wanted something that would pull your mail from the server over the phone's built-in Internet connection. So, I got SnapperMail, one of the nicest applications I've ever seen on a Palm. The program even has a mode for browsing e-mail without a stylus because you don't want to pull it out. It's a great time saver.

I also have MyBible, a great Palm application that turns your phone into a bible study device. You can load in numerous translations of the scriptures, highlight and take notes on verses, etc. Pick a book with the stylus, and then you can type in the chapter and verse via the phone's built-in keypad. Plus, there's no big book to carry around.

A few times, people have called me while on the road saying something is wrong with my website. Most of the management of the site is best done with SSH, but what if I'm nowhere near a computer? I found a free, open-source program called TuSSH which will allow you to get into your full SSH session if needed. I don't recommend doing major administration on such a small screen without a keyboard, but in a pinch, it'll do.

My absolute favorite, though,, is Pocket Quicken. For years, I've been keeping track of how much money I have via the ubiquitous Quicken software, and this is the perfect add-on. Whenever I purchase something or go to the bank/ATM, I pull out my phone and quickly enter the payment into Pocket Quicken. It does a great job at autocompleting the company you're paying as well as the category this transaction goes in. Most of the time, it only takes a second or two to enter the transaction. Plus, I always have that main screen there to tell me what the balance of my accounts are. When I am going to update my desktop quicken, I just HotSync my phone with my computer and it all gets transferred over.

So... what does this all have to do with the Apple iPhone? Well, it has to do with Steve's WWDC Keynote where he announced that you could make web applications for the iPhone. Only one of these programs can be done on the iPhone, and that's using their built-in mail client. I doubt their mail client will have all the features that SnapperMail offers me, either, especially since in January Steve talked about working with Yahoo! Mail and I use my own mail server.

For the Bible, I could log on to BibleGateway and read it there. Who knows, it might look good on an iPhone. But, how long does it take to connect to AT&T's wireless internet? 10 seconds? 20 seconds? No matter what, it's longer than it is on my Samsung smartphone. It's gotta take longer to search via the webform too.

SSH? Well, a quick search on Google shows that you can do it if the iPhone supports Java. But, who knows if it will? Apparently someone is already working on getting an iPhone SSH client working, but I have to imagine it's going to be much harder to do just with the default Safari install than if you actually had a full development environment for the iPhone.

And Pocket Quicken? Fat chance of something that cool and useful coming to the iPhone until they release a large SDK. Sure, I could probably use a Quicken.com account to do the same thing. But, how long would it take to enter a transaction? 10 seconds to connect to Internet, another 15 seconds at the least to login and navigate to the entry page, and then at least 15 seconds to enter it. That's easily 3-4 times as long! Even if it can autologin to Quicken.com over a web SSL connection, it'll still take a bunch longer.

And, what if I'm out of a high-speed data area for whatever reason? I'm dead in the water. I can't use any of my custom applications. One decent solution that was mentioned on this week's TWiT was that it could work if the iPhone was outfitted with something like Google Gears. Applications with Gears or its cousin, Adobe Apollo, could possibly give users such as myself the functionality we need with their ability to work offline and synchronize when they are back online.

So, for now, I'm looking for a phone to replace my Samsung i500. It looks like I'll have to go with one of those bulky Palm Treos.

Last year, the website CityBuilder.org was the host of tons of information relating to building cities for Christ in the People of Praise. Much of the short video pieces were related to fixing up and building houses in Allendale, a poor neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana. However, the weekly live video broadcasts covered a much broader section of topics applicable to City Building and People of Praise life in general.

Tonight starts the second summer of live videos, but this time they're not going to be from Louisiana. This year, there are city building projects of different types in Indianapolis and also starting in Memphis, Tennessee in the fall. So, this year's broadcasts are, at least for now, coming from South Bend, Indiana. Who knows what they'll be about, but I'm told that you'll be able to watch them anytime from their archives on blip.tv, which is great. (They also put up the archives from all last year too!) So, if you want to learn a lot more about People of Praise life, check out what we've been thinking and talking about this summer and last and, if you want, join in the conversation. Also, don't miss the nice new CityBuilder.org website, which includes a blog, photos, and much more about our life in common. Join us live tonight, too, if you like.

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Last week we biked to Hidden Falls and on Tuesday I biked to and from work, but I needed to kick it up a notch this weekend because I didn't bike at all on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. So, I biked for 17 miles (and got a bit of walking in over by the lakes). Here's the map:

First, I biked along the Hiawatha Light Rail line for a bit until I got to the Lake Street Area. There I biked right onto the Midtown Greenway, which stretches all the way through South Minneapolis and a good way beyond. The Greenway is a great, long path that replaced an old railroad bed that stretched all the way through South Minneapolis and further west. The western end of the Greenway opened in 2000 and is a nice, wide path in most places for biking and walking. Throughout all of Minneapolis, it is in a bit of a trench that goes underneath almost all the streets along 29th Street, but it is nice and green and has landscaping projects going along with it. It is connected to a further trail west, such that I biked past Highway 100 before turning back.

Plans are still in gear for the east end of the Greenway, although it is almost complete. The crown jewel of the Greenway seems to be a bridge they are currently constructing that goes across Hiawatha Avenue and the Light Rail line. (Temporarily the bikers and walkers just had to walk across the busy street at a light, but now you can't even do that with the bridge construction.) It looks like the designers were trying to rip off Norman Foster, but I just found out from this blog post that it is because of all the obstructions they had to get the bridge through on the East side where large power lines, another bike path, and light rail collide. It'll definitely be fun to ride across.

On the way back, I decided to take a more road-focused but direct way home. I rode up Hennepin Avenue until it became a bit of a freeway, at which time I found a cool bike/walk bridge and a path down to Loring Park. I just then biked through downtown on Nicollet Mall and then across the Hennepin bridge to University Ave. It was a great 17-mile trek, and I really enjoyed exploring Minneapolis by bike.

Many have been talking about the future of computing being something you can easily touch. Tom Cruise did it in Minority Report. There's been demos of people playing Warcraft or manipulating maps and stuff only using very intuitive commands via their fingers. Heck, even Apple has gotten on to it by allow you to do some of these features on your iPhone with that "pinching" thing.

From the video demos on their website, it looks like Microsoft has done a good job of implementing this stuff. They call it Microsoft Surface, and they say it will be available for purchase in late 2007. The Surface is a 30-inch LCD display embedded in a table-like device. It looks like there's no Start buttons and such, just a table to interact with. The videos show people moving items around with just the flick of a finger and resizing them by pulling or pushing two corners at a time. It shows people putting their camera or cell phone on the table and all their photos laying out below the camera. Someone else can drag those photos onto their camera to copy them. The experience looks very intuitive and, well, it could be "the wave of the future."

It looks pretty cool, but allow me to be a bit skeptical for right now. Sometimes Microsoft announces products at this stage and they don't really go anywhere. I get the impression that if you're going to see them anywhere this winter, it's going to be at the W or other such trendy, expensive places. But, hey, it's about time we got some better ideas than just using a mouse and keyboard to control our computers!

You can watch Bill Gates show off the Surface on the Today Show to see more cool functionality.