I swore I wouldn’t do it. Stood tall on my soapbox and declared that it would never happen. Said you could take it to the bank.

Now look at me. Reach right down in my pocket and what do you find?

No, sorry. Other pocket. There you go. See what I mean?

In a moment of weakness, I got myself a smartphone. Only, calling this thing a smartphone feels like an understatement. This thing, the Optimus V, is brilliant. And I mean Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr brilliant, not Matt Damon in that movie about apples.

And versatile. I sit in the newsroom and wonder why I’m there at all. The desk phone beside me looks like a quaint artifact, something that might have been used in the mid-1800s by a stern man with round glasses and a handlebar mustache. I mean, look at the giant handset and its gnarled and knotted cord. Why would I possibly use the thing, when the Optimus V can make phone calls at the sound of my voice?

The Rolodex next to the giant phone belongs in a museum. To get to the number you want, you have to flip through dozens — nay, hundreds — of cards, risking a nasty paper cut or, worse, boredom. The Optimus V, with its built-in contacts, will find who I’m looking for with the flick of my thumb. Since I’m synced with Facebook, it will also show me a photo of that person (in case I decide they’re too ugly to call) and tell me what he or she is up to at the moment.

Oh, look. Louis is at a funeral for his momma. Let’s utter his name into the Optimus and give him a call. Better yet, let’s send him a humorous video through text messaging to cheer him up.

Even the desktop computer looks like a relic. To put information in or get information out, you have to type on a keyboard. Talk about cumbersome and bad for the nails.

With the Optimus V, I can write emails, send messages, take notes for my memoirs or order up music with the handy text-to-voice feature. I just say what I want and it appears moments later in written form.

Sure, it’s not perfect. I utter,”Bring home milk and pizza, will you?” into the little microphone and it spits out, “I’m going to kill you in your sleep!” The occasional misunderstanding and restraining order is a small sacrifice for all this technology.

For years, I carried around a police scanner. It’s a monstrous thing, probably five pounds and hideous to look at. The antenna is horribly bent, like the nose of a career pugilist. It scares children and girls laugh at me. But no more. Now that I’ve downloaded Radio Scanner, I just tune in to thrilling emergency calls on the Optimus V. It discovers my location and automatically pulls in signals from nearby police and fire departments. If I go through the settings carefully, I may find a way for it to fix my parking tickets.

Oh, and look over here. On the desk is also a sizable stack of maps. Maps! Who am I, Magellan? I’m expected to flip through all those filthy pages and squint at confusing charts?

I need to find Spleen Road, Lisbon, pronto and I don’t want to have to work very hard to do it. No problem, I’ll just speak my needs into the Optimus V and it will display a map with written directions and show me up-close views of the majesty of Spleen Road. The Optimus V will talk me through even the most complex route, telling me where to turn and only occasionally causing me to drive into a lagoon.

The Optimus V can find anything. More important, it can find me.

Behold My Tracks, thus far my favorite app. When I go for rides on my Suzuki dual sport, My Tracks keeps a running map of my travels, on the street, in the woods or, that one time, upside down in a dumpster. Cooler still, I have it rigged so that if my wife wants to find me, she can send a certain super-secret phrase to my phone and it will send back a map to my location.

I think we can all see the sheer hilarity that’s to come with this kind of technology. One day, I’ll tell my wife that I’m going to the brothel in Greene, but when she queries my phone, she’ll discover that I actually went for ice cream. But again, who cares? What’s a knee to the groin when you’re getting back all of this hi-tech convenience?

The Optimus V is my camera, my phone, my alarm clock, my secretary, my ebook reader, my stereo, my music collection, my photo album, my address book, my veterinarian, my astronaut, my hair stylist.

I have a program that will identify songs for me just by listening to me hum. I can babble the name of a song into the phone and have it downloaded and playing within 30 seconds.

Even the notebook in my back pocket, a friend for many years, would be better used as kindling. Why should I scribble into it, with a pen that leaks or a pencil that goes dull, when the Optimus V has Evernote. With that, I can jot down a note on my computer, read it hours later while I’m at the Walmart shopping for some kind of pill to ease groin pain.

I use Google Goggles to identify things I don’t recognize. I use Barcode Reader to scan items for more information. I can bark things into the phone to get further information, talking to it as I roam through the store so that it looks like I’m having a loud argument with my hand.

I was wrong to eschew this technology; I see that now. Technology is marvelous, an always-evolving set of concepts designed to improve and simplify our lives. Why, just the other day I read an article about how computer programs will soon be able to write news stories and even novels without human input. Not only is the Optimus V making all of my old gadgets obsolete, it may make me obsolete, as well.

And I welcome it. Running around asking questions of complete strangers is a waste of my time. Spending long hours at the keyboard making up stories is just nonsensical. Why bother? When a gadget smaller than a pack of smokes can do it better and faster than me?

The Optimus V may someday ride off with my motorcycle and start romancing my wife. But until then, it serves me just fine. In fact, I’m off to the app store to see if there’s a way to make the phone write this column from now on. It will probably just spit out random strings of words for the first nine or ten months, but really — who’s going to notice?

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can smartphone him at [email protected].