Past, meet future

I had a difficult time trying to decide where to put this post, but as it has more to do with technology than my usual "reflection" or political bias rants, I opted for here.

A couple days ago, I had a phone conversation with my son. It's such a simple thing to say, and for millions of people, such a mundane concept. But when I hung up, I marveled at the whole process.

I just upgraded phones, so my  Google Nexus One has been sitting idle for the past week, and my son, rather than see it collect dust, decided it could be better put to use playing Angry Birds and tower defense games. It's hard to argue with that logic, knowing it's going to be another week or two before I find the time to back up the SD card, reset to factory defaults, and list it on ebay. Besides, I knew I had a couple more long nights at the office in my future, so I figured it would help keep him occupied during his time at grandma and grandpa's.

Then it hit me. He's been asking for a phone of his own, but I'm not about to give him a phone -- especially with the cost of service on an additional line and a data plan -- just so that we can talk once per week and send little text messages when he feels too lazy to come out of his bedroom. Yet, there's this very capable phone with wi-fi...

Skype.

Lucky for me, my parents are just far enough inside the tech jungle to have a wireless router and broadband internet service. So I installed Skype on both our phones, created an account for him, signed us both in, and... Viola! Test call complete.

The messaging function of Skype works while I'm on 3G, so we can text chat when I'm out of the office, and when wi-fi is available I can just call him and his phone rings. We can just talk. On cell phones. Over the internet. Without using minutes. Without a data plan. For free. And the quality was no different than an ordinary cell call.

These are amazing times we live in, and I've only just scratched the surface of the capability here. Even a friend of mine commented on it: he knows how to use Skype? Even I don't have a Skype account. Thought I'd share.

What about you? What interesting ways do you find yourself using your mobile devices?