Until recently, I owned a cell phone that made and received calls and could be coaxed into taking the occasional grainy picture. When I answered it in front of friends, they would often marvel at its "Zack Morris" qualities. Then I got an iPhone 3G.

This week I'm visiting New York City, my old stomping grounds before I moved to San Francisco. I've been gone two and a half years, which is just long enough for me to completely forget everything. Compounding my acute amnesia is the fact that I'm crashing with various friends in neighborhoods I'm not familiar with. And so it was yesterday that I found myself utterly lost and completely unable to find Houston Street. (This is hilarious to New Yorkers. It's a major thoroughfare and was only a few blocks north of me at the time.)

That's when I remembered it. My iPhone! I pulled it out and clicked on the map, and it showed me exactly where I was. Then after work, I met friends for happy hour, and having learned my lesson, I plugged the bar's address into my phone. It drew a line on the map, showing me exactly how to get there, and even traced my progress as I wove my way through the city streets.

This week, Google Maps made headlines when it added New York City's mass transit to its maps (which is the same map that the iPhone uses). Now I can not only locate the closest subway stop but also see that it's the 4, 5, 6 train and not the 1, 2, 3. T-Mobile also made techno-savvy tongues wag with the announcement that it will soon release a competitor to Apple's iPhone. The Android will be the first phone to run Google's mobile device software.

To me, this seems to be the beginning of the end for traditional maps. I can remember my parents showing me how to read their AAA portable atlas of the United States before my first cross-country road trip. Now I can easily envision someday having to explain to my own children that maps used to be printed! On paper! And you had to know how to read them!

Losing printed maps and the ability to read them makes me slightly nostalgic. Nothing has me longing for a new adventure more than the sight of a weathered map in the back of an antique bookstore. But there's no going back from my iPhone. I never get lost anymore and it's so much easier than carrying a small folding map of each city I visit. In short, it has completely revolutionized how I travel.