So, my family has been in prison. Cell phone prison. We had iPhones with AT&T.

We’ve had them since the dawn of time. Well, actually, the dawn of the iPhone 3G. Recently, however, something important came to my attention: We don’t need traditional cell service, anymore. The world is evolving, and cell plans are not.

Here’s the deal – two iPhones and a simple cell phone for my dad. That’s one-hundred eighty dollars monthly. Why? Because we’re “special.” first, with an iPhone (any smart-phone, actually) you have to have a data plan. We are the unlimited data plan hold-outs – thirty dollars a month, for each phone. We have lousy cell service here in the mountains of Washington, so add another twenty dollars a month for the AT&T MicroCell (a service that lets you use your cell service over your internet connection).

Then there’s all the cost for the rest of the cell service that we’re not really using, because in the mountains, we rarely touch the phones. Even taking multiple trips into town, using Pandora all the way in and around town, we get nowhere NEAR the threatening level of data use that scares AT&T. Right now, At the time of writing, I used nine minutes call time of five-hundred fifty, one of the lowest calling plans, and I’m paying the bill in seven days. I have so many rollover minutes, that I may never be charged for a cell call for the rest of my life.

AT&T must love me – Paying for things we’re just not using. But no more – today, I’ve cancelled phone service to the two iPhones – no more Data charges, no more MicroCell charges, no more minutes charges – no more. Done. I’ll only be paying around thirty dollars for my Father’s phone, the only phone left on the account. Period.

Why this madness? Our phones are “smart” phones. They do things that used to be delegated to computers. You can load individual programs and run them. Things like Skype. Skype lets you place phone calls over the Internet. It started on the computer, but soon migrated to smart phones. We’ve had Skype on our phones almost as long as we’ve owned them. In fact, I thought it would be nice for my Wife and I to have an extra number. An actual dial-able phone number (with voicemail), and an unlimited US calling plan for Skype is around eighty dollars for a year (it’s a deal, one of them is half-off when you buy the other, but I forget which). That’s pretty easy on the wallet. Although the prices may be changing now that the big “M” (Microsoft) has taken over. We’ll see.

Now you’re probably seeing the logic: Skype plus Wi-Fi means no real need for AT&T. I thought about that, but I wasn’t convinced – what about being on the road? You still need some kind of service if you want to be reached on the road. My wife gets client calls often, and they need a way to contact her if we’re out and about. So, I had put the idea aside, hoping something cool would avail itself.

It was our iPads that finally helped me bring the last piece of the puzzle together. And not for the reason of ridding ourselves of the cell phone shackles. We only have Wi-Fi iPads, no cell connection. I got tired of our stops for a quick bite at places with no Wi-Fi. Shouldn’t everyone have Wi-Fi service by now? Shouldn’t the government make it mandatory, or something?

First I looked at our own cell phones for an answer to iPad connectivity, but AT&T wanted even more money to add Personal Hotspot service to the phones that already had that service built-in. Very annoying.

Next, I looked at stand-alone 3G “hotspots,” small, credit card-sized devices that, basically, use cell service as an internet connection. Trouble was, the cell providers wanted contracts for the service in exchange for a decent purchase point for the unit. Until I stumbled upon Virgin Mobile. They had a pay as you go service, twenty dollars a month for three-hundred meg of data usage, or fifty dollars a month for unlimited data. No contract. You can connect up to five devices at once. I thought of the pleasant afternoons my Wife and I would have sitting, sipping coffee, talking and playing War Of Words. Whether the stupid coffee shop had Wi-Fi or not (I’m telling you, mandatory…).

THEN it dawned on me: here was the answer to having Skype on all the time. Get the device, turn it on while traveling, and -poof- you can get a call. Heck, even the iPads have Skype, and the ability to use Bluetooth headsets; might just be able to leave the phones at home!

The purchase price of the Virgin MiFi 2200 was a little steep, one-hundred fifty dollars, but I found someone selling one on eBay for seventy: that made the experiment worth-while. Once I received it, I purchased a month at the lowest data plan, twenty bucks, then we drove into town with our iPhones only on Wi-Fi, connected to the hotspot. We could get calls at the Skype numbers with no trouble. We called each other and listened, the call quality was no different than a standard cell call. And there was the added benefit of being able to connect the iPads as well.

All for twenty dollars a month. Even with the purchase price of the hotspot, that’s one heck of a savings over the AT&T bill. Our cell costs have dropped from one-hundred eighty down to fifty (still have Dad’s cell plan). Haven’t found the need to up the monthly data charges to the fifty dollars a month unlimited data plan, but with the pay as you go plan, I can change that at any time – even drop it back down the next month if our data use goes back down. Note, however, that the hotspot isn’t very Mac-like, you do need to understand how a wireless router works to set it up properly. If you’ve done it for your house, you’ll understand after reading the instructions.

Right now we are always traveling together, but if that changes, I’ll get a second hotspot: We could both be on the road separately at twenty dollars a month each. I smile every time I think of that.

Now I devised this plan thinking about using our already-purchased iPhones and our iPads. You could start from scratch and just get a pay as you go phone, or use your newer iPod touch. Heck our next phone “upgrades” might actually BE to iPod touches (when they get Siri, of course…)! And, with the hotspot, we are wide open for all types of use, whether phone, Internet, laptops, iPads. This pretty much ends any troubles with connectivity.

“Can you here me now?” Yes. Even with no traditional cell service.

I’m still smiling.

Love them or hate them, Apple has a plan. Perhaps it’s global domination, perhaps it’s just creating beautiful products that work together. In any case, the newest things to hit the Apple ecosphere are the much talked-about iCloud service, and iTunes match.

In a quick overview: iTunes Match fixes the problem of syncing the music that you want to your satellite devices (in my case, the iPhone and iPad). Those devices don’t have as much space as your computer hard drive, and plugging it into your computer to sync, choosing which tunes to copy – really annoying. With iTunes Match, your devices sync over iCloud, and you see all of your music on, say, your iPhone. Pick the album or songs that you want to hear, and the music is loaded to the device for listening. There are more details, but that about covers the basic function for which it was designed. The major difference between iTunes match and the other guys is that iTunes doesn’t load all of your music up into the cloud from your computer. If they have your “match,” They push their own copy of the music to your other devices. The only music that they upload from your collection are tunes they don’t have, like your Metallica concert bootlegs or a particularly old Gene Autrey album.

With that fact in mind, there’s an interesting side-benefit: since Apple is loading the matched tunes to your phone from their servers, why not also load the music to your computer if you need it? Let’s say you ripped CD back in the dark-ages of digital music. You know, 2003. Then, a 128k .mp3 was considered pretty high-quality, and took up very little precious, expensive (for the time) hard drive space. Now we realize that 128k sounds like crap. Music pirates won’t even touch 128k files for free. Even music services like MOG stream at 320k, so you are now very aware that your 128k files suck.

But, darn it, you cant find that CD to re-rip it at a better quality. You’ve moved three times, and possibly loaned it to a nefarious neighbor that never returned it, then played it very loudly (and often) after you left the neighborhood. What to do?

Simply delete it from iTunes on your computer, and re-load if from Apple’s servers, just like you would load it to your iPhone. Since they are 256k AAC files, They sound miles better than that old 128k .mp3 drivel. Poof! Instant upgrade.

So, 25 bucks (24.99) sounded like a great investment to tinker with the service, and maybe fix a few old recordings. I not only synced all my music and did some album replacing, but tried some nasty cheating to see if I could trip-up the service.

After setting everything up and letting iTunes Match do its work, I can say that  iTunes match is not perfect. However, it’s no slouch. Using an algorithm similar to a program like Shazam, iTunes Match scours all of your music, matching your songs with Apple’s, then uploading anything that they don’t have from your computer to the cloud. Oddly enough, a few mainstream albums managed one or two songs that didn’t match, even though they technically should have. I have an Alan Parsons album completely matched except for the last song, and quite a few others that are in a similar state. There are all kinds of theories running around: lousy bit rates being too noisy to match; new, remastered albums not being a perfect sonic match to the original releases. Whatever. I’d say Apple’s about ninety-nine percent accurate, and that’s quite an achievement.

The biggest trouble that I had was with classical music. But (and pay attention) it wasn’t Apple’s fault at all. My problem with iTunes Match and classical is totally the fault of the music industry.

Too often, classical recordings are seen as commodities that can be passed off, shuffled and re-released over and over again. They are faceless pieces of music that are often only known by the composer who wrote them, not the conductor or symphony that performed them. One company releases an older recording that they purchased from another label. Five years later, they get rid of it, or go under, and someone else releases it. But, hey, it’s only a forty-five minute recording of a Mozart symphony, let’s add this concerto to fill-out the CD. A Barry Manilow album is always the same album, even if they decide to change the cover a bit. He released them with a certain title, in a certain order, and it will stay that way well beyond the day when Mr. Manilow is no more.

When iTunes matched one-half of an album, which was one concerto, it would not match the other half, which was a different concerto. Obviously, someone re-released half of the album that I owned on some other album that I didn’t, but iTunes recognized the songs, just the same. Another series of albums, the complete Beethoven symphonies, was re-released by another company, but given completely different covers, and were no-longer seen as a set, but individual albums. I guess when you spend your life in the bargain bin looking for inexpensive classical albums, expect a rocky time with iTunes Match. Once again, my classical woes were not Apple’s fault, and kudos to them for finding the works they had on their servers at all.

Lastly, as I do with all new techie things, I had to try to push iTunes Match to it’s limits, trying something utterly wrong to see if I could stump the service, and learn how things work in the process. To do this, I flat-out lied. I tried an experiment to see if a true Music Pirate could get away with murder. I picked an album that I don’t own, have no recordings of, or even really wanted (but that’s beside the point – its an experiment, dammit!), looked it up in the iTunes store and got to work.

Using an MP3 editor, I took a DIFFERENT album that I actually own, and changed all of the tags of the MP3 tracks and renamed them to match the artist, album name, album cover and track names. Would iTunes match see all the false data and give me a pass? Would Apple give me an album that I didn’t own? I Loaded my counterfeit album into iTunes, and asked the Apple music gods to match it…

…And Apple did. ITunes Match matched my fake album – with the actual album that it WAS – NOT the fake one that I tried to pass off on them. Sorry pirates, you’ll just have to steal your music from somewhere else and load it into iTunes. Even though iTunes had all of the wrong data that I forced down its throat, it still matched the individual tracks to the real album. Looking at those results, I walked away with the following insights:

iTunes Match is based solely on the sonic signature of the music tracks to make a match. It also leaves your titles, track order, etc. in tact. This makes perfect sense, especially if you didn’t like the name of the Thriller 25th Anniversary album and re-named it simply, Thriller, the way God intended it. It won’t confuse iTunes Match, which will still match the tunes, and leave the names the way you like them. The same goes for album covers (mostly, it did change one from my collection) and your own personal playlists or Frankensteinian album creations. I’ve made a couple of 80′s compilations with my own cover – iTunes matched the songs, and left my info intact.

So, overall, I give iTunes Match what I call an “Apple” A. Other people may complain about the less than 100% matching ability, and give it a “real-world” B, but I’ve been around the Apple universe long enough to know that there will be updates to address the issue and make it a non-issue. At that time, Apple will forget the issue ever existed, so they can tout how perfect it was right from the start. Even after Steve Job’s passing, the ‘reality distortion field’ is still firmly in place. It’s a part of his legacy. That, and some really cool ideas like iTunes Match.

Amazon’s Cloud services are the newest in a long line of Digital Excitement – products and services out in the cloud or on your hard drive. You can own movies, music, books and more without ever going to a store, or putting a physical product in your hand.

The question is: Do you really own anything, anymore?

Sure, it’s your data file. It’s on your hard drive, or your cloud service of choice – but there are no more physical books, DVDs or CDs in your hand. For that matter, they are technically nowhere. You have purchased the right to view or listen – not much else.

Don’t get me wrong – I go everywhere with my iPad – I read books, listen to music, and watch video. I also have taken all of my DVD collection and moved them to my hard drive and iTunes account, along with all of my CDs. After I had done the move, it started to dawn on me – I didn’t need these things, anymore – after all, they are on my hard drive – why not toss them? Maybe give them to the library or a needy friend? The trouble is, besides possibly not being legal, I would no longer have the stuff if something catastrophic happened to my computer. And, I’d have no proof that I ever owned them in the first place. Even if I simply keep the files and toss the physical media – I’m technically left with nothing but an experience.

Then I started thinking about the cloud itself. If I trust my purchases to a service out on the cloud – what happens if they go belly up or if they lose all my data? Where do I go to get my stuff? How do I get it back? How do I prove that it was mine in the first place?

Data is turning into money – When an unscrupulous financier swindles hapless families of their life savings – it’s gone – there’s no getting it back. We expect to lose our stuff if, God forbid, the house burns down – but not if Google has a hiccup. What happens if Amazon says, “never mind, this cloud thing was a bad idea. Get your stuff off of here by Thursday – we’re shutting the doors.” Will you even have the bandwidth or hard drive space to get your stuff back? Will we become so dependent on others for our storage that we’re unable to keep our files at home?

When my mother passed away, I got her stuff. Some books, some videos, clothing, etc. If we go the direction of the digital cloud, we’re going to need a whole new kind of access just to get a loved-one’s stuff. Grandpa had better keep a list of all his passwords, or you’re never going to see his copy of Casablanca. Will we need court orders and proof of death to take over uncle Ernie’s jazz collection?

Lastly, is this belittling the quality of the things we access? We used to take pride in a collection of, say, Disney DVD’s. I for one, am in the process of collecting the Complete Peanuts book collection, as each volume is released. With physical items, there is something to treasure. Something of worth that you can physically see and touch. It has physical value that we equate to craftsmanship, workmanship, mental effort and talent. If I have nothing but files, do I actually think less of the items?

Think of movie theaters – the grand old houses are closing at an alarming rate. Why take the time to get the family together, drive out and join in with others to view the beauty and majesty of a film in it’s natural habitat, when I can download it a few months later via iTunes for $5.99?

We’re changing from owners to consumers – from experiencers to downloaders. When everything becomes a file, sits on a server, and is experienced instantly by the truckloads – what will be our measurement of worth and heritage, our understanding of the efforts that originally produced these items?

Will it all be disposable both in format and meaning? Will we actually own anything? More importantly, will we WANT to? There’s an implication there not only for movie theaters, motion picture companies, music producers, authors and game manufacturers, but for ourselves as well. The days of the movie collection and the photo album are disappearing quickly. When history is only digital, and no longer in our hands, what value will it hold for us? Who will have control of it?

Will it even be ours?