Bond. James Bond.

For men of a certain age, the James Bond 007 films are iconic. Urbane, witty, well-dressed, and powerful, Bond was a role model. Why?

For his drinking habits? No. (Although to this day, I prefer my Diet Coke shaken, not stirred. Wish he'd warned me about the dry cleaning bills.)

For his fearless derring-do? Well, maybe, in a Cowboys-and-Indians kind of way.

For his success with beautiful, scantily-clad women with double-entendre names? No. (We noticed that part later.)

No, what made James Bond a hero to millions of boys growing up in the 1960s and '70s was the gadgets. All the cool stuff that Q came up with to keep Bond in the loop, on target and out of the bad guys' clutches was what made him worth watching.

So I can't help wondering what the fictional Bond -- the icy-cool essence of all things sophisticated and technologically hip -- would make of today's wired world.

I propose that we've all become James Bond. After all, it's now possible to carry a phone in your pocket. The shoe phone of another famous secret agent, Maxwell Smart, is a reality after all.

For that matter, it's possible to carry a smartphone (no relation to Agent 86) that has more computing power -- in your shirt pocket or purse -- than the room-sized machines NASA used to send men to the moon.

Camera phones can surreptitiously take pictures in a resolution Bond couldn't dream of, and we don't have to wait to get the film processed. Portable GPS units track our every move, and can pinpoint where we are at any time.

Then there's the fact that I'm currently sitting in a coffee shop in Florida typing this into a computer that's hardly larger than a steno pad. It weighs about 2.5 pounds. Its 8.9 inch screen shows me any Web site I care to visit. It has wi-fi access to let me post this, a built-in webcam and a 160-gigabyte hard drive. If I download Skype, I can talk to anyone in the world.

It cost $300. No, that's not a typo.

Between the hardware and sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, we can be in constant contact with friends and acquaintances at any time, anywhere.

Maybe it's time to update that classic exchange between Bond and Goldfinger:

"Do you expect me to talk?"

"No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to TWEET."

Truly, we live in amazing times. Now if we could just get the Aston-Martin DB5, complete with the ejector seat and those really cool machine guns behind the headlights ...