I’m on vacation this week. I was supposed to unplug, but so far its been a bad experiment. Most things I need are online. The concierge only has listings for fancy restaurants, so if I want to go somewhere that isn’t a four star deal, I can’t count on the hotel to recommend anything. 

At the moment, I don’t have an iPhone. (I’m still in a contract for a few more months and I want to wait for the next hardware release.)

This is the first time I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just have an iPhone for travel, rather than lugging a laptop around and paying big network fees in a hotel. If I had an iPhone, when I’m 5 blocks away from the hotel, I could find the nearest place to purchase sunscreen or a snack without having to walk all the way back. Maps would be available. I could look up that monument and see what its history is in context.

None of these ideas are new–the new part, is that I want to do that, and remain unplugged. Socially unplugged, not digitally unplugged. I’d like an iPhone with a “vacation-mode” where email sits on a server somewhere, and my phone number changes or routes incoming calls for the week to voicemail.

I don’t want to unplug from information–I want to unplug from people.

Trend: vacation still means being plugged in. How about an iPhone “vacation mode”?

“Ben Thomas, 27, had his own explanation for iPhone mania. ”It’s a chick magnet,” he said. (AP newswire)

The most interesting thing about this for me–is the volume of people worldwide who want the device. Wanting it enough that they will wait outside for hours including overnight to be among the first to have it. 

I wish we could get that kind of voter turnout in the US come election time.

Trend: Status over Civics