I’ve been saying it for a long time: the world is going mobile. It needs to. If information wants to be free, it wants to be free to move. Information shouldn’t just pop up through periodic wormholes; it should be with us anywhere we are.

The major promise of web-based applications is their availability cross-platform, cross-device, and cross-country. My personal contacts, email, bookmarks, calendar, photos, and even voice mail are all either exclusively kept in web-based services or are kept on my computer and mirrored into online services. I’ve gone this route because I want access to all that information at any time regardless of whether I’m in front of my computer or not. I want regular access to this information in order to ease the running of my life.

I’ve carried some sort of Palm PDA with me since 1997. In 2003, I bought a Treo 600, hoping to take advantage of its wireless internet connectivity. While the 600 is a great device in many respects, and was certainly a big step forward for smartphones, I have always been frustrated by the low fidelity of its mobile browsing. (And by AT&T’s outrageously expensive data plans.) When I could connect with the 600 (which wasn’t always), web sites could take a long time to load. And since I never knew if I was going over my alloted data plan, I often avoided using the browser so I wouldn’t have to pay overage charges.

But the 600 still fulfilled my desire for data portability. As long as I synchronized regularly with my computer, I always had my latest contact and calendar information handy. And even though it was clunky, email was at least accessible.

But here’s the thing: it’s not just my personal information that I want access to. What I really want is access to the vast store of information available on the web. When it’s 5:00 on a Friday and my wife and I want to go out to eat, I want the name and address of that restaurant I bookmarked in Menuism. I want to find out what movies are playing downtown. I want to know the name of the actress in Double Indemnity, and put that movie in my Netflix queue. I want driving directions to the Boeing Surplus Store. When I’m in Barnes & Noble, I want to look at my Amazon wish list to get the name of the book I read about on my favorite blog. I want to manage my Backpack to-do lists; what groceries did I need to buy, and where was I going to stop next time I’m in Fremont?

In other words, I’ve been using the tools of Web 2.0 to simplify and organize my life, and to improve my understanding of the world. But those tools are only really useful to me if I happen to be in front of a computer, or if I somehow wrestle the output onto the Treo or onto paper. If I do that, though, my data can rapidly get out of sync; it takes time and energy to reconcile all the bits again.

My buddy, Travis, hit the nail on the head recently on his Crap Monkey Podcast when he mentioned that he had three lives to maintain now: work life, home life, and online life. It shouldn’t be that way. Technology has got to start layering over our lives, enhancing our work and home lives instead of remaining separate; reducing complexity instead of adding it.

The iPod does this with audio. I carry my Nano around my neck, so it’s always available to me. My music and podcasts move with me, allowing me to effortlessly dip into that well whenever I want. The promise of the iPhone is that it will do for information what the iPod does for audio.

After less than a day of use, I can tell you that this first-generation iPhone isn’t perfect. But it is very, very well done, and in many ways it is an astonishingly long jump forward for mobile technology. Whether it actually turns out to be the device of my dreams, the one that actually helps simplify and enhance my first two lives remains to be seen. But so far, it looks to me as if the iPhone lives up to the hype.

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