If you told me as a 10 year old that we would have devices like the iPhone I would not have doubted you for an instant. Of course we would have a sleek little device that fits in our pocket, allows us to communicate with (essentially) everyone in the world, and affords access to the complete sum of world knowledge (again, essentially). Not having an understanding of cellular telephony, computers, or the Internet certainly made this idea seem much more feasible when I was 10 than when I was 20.

A little over a week ago I got an iPhone. I’d wanted one since it was announced, but delayed my purchase due to the upfront cost, the monthly bill, and the slow death of my notebook computer to which it would sync. All of those issues became meaningless or were remedied with time. And now I have one.

And it is just like the future. Sure it’s built on a set of technologies found in many other wireless devices. And sure there have been smart phones for years that did many of the same things the iPhone does. They just don’t do them nearly as well1.

Now I am finally free to explore the wealth (or glut) of iPhone apps. As a follower of Apple news it was oftentimes very frustrating to continually hear about exciting new applications that ran on a platform to which I had no access. I’ll share my absolute favorite application today. It’s a little app called CameraBag and it’s terribly damned clever.

See, despite all of its advances, the iPhone still comes bundled with a pretty lousy camera that takes pretty lousy pictures like you would see from any run-of-the-mill mobile phone camera. CameraBag takes that flaw, and turns it on its head. It’s an app that takes a photo from the camera and applies one of a number of filters to it that emulate cheap cameras of the past. Suddenly your crappy mobile phone picture looks like a crappy snapshot that you found in your parent’s attic. They look a whole lot cooler that way. For $2.992 it makes taking photos with your little iPhone camera a whole lot more fun.

1 With the exception of email, I’ll grant you that. While the iPhone’s Mail application is functional, I’m sure it doesn’t hold a candle to that of a Blackberry, say.

2 If $2.99 is just far too spendy for you, they make a lite version for $0.99 that has the three most popular filters.