When was the last time a tech device captured the pop-culture imagination quite so completely? So we thought we’d note the most prominent iPhone sightings in the pop-cult sphere. Here, our favorite iPhone film, TV, and Web-video cameos from the last year or so.

Category: Best Evil Overlord Assistance

Dr. Horrible’s van-blasting iPhone app saves his day.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog—starring Neil Patrick Harris

Poor Dr. Horrible: He’s all set to pull off the heist that’ll get him the wonderflonium he needs for his freeze-ray when his beloved Penny shows up. OK, never mind the exact plot-points. In Joss Whedon’s writers-strike Web musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog--starring Neil Patrick Harris (Dr. Horrible), Felicia Day (Penny), and Nathan Fillion (Capt. Hammer)--it’s an iPhone with a remote-control app that heists the courier van and kicks off the chain of events that ends with--sorry,  no spoilers!

Category: Best Use of a Most Desired--but nonexistent in the real world--Feature

Chuck gets a picture via MMS from Morgan. We wish it weren’t fiction!

Here is what we learned from NBC’s Chuck this year: Though the rest of us pine for the day that we can send and receive picture messages via multimedia messaging (MMS) on our iPhones, secret agents can do it any ol’ time--even when they’re just posing as mild-mannered Buy More employees.

Category: Smokingest Gun

Amber, Angie, Amy, Anna, Adrian, Ashley, Aubrey, Britney Miami Call Her, Britney Canada Whore…

OMG, srsly, this one time? On the MTV show The Hills? Lauren Conrad was talking to Brody? And she totally called him out for having a billion girls’ numbers on his iPhone. And there’s no way they were all his “friends” because there were like sooo many of them. And also a guy would probably not refer to his friend as “Britney Canada Whore.” And also, his excuse was that the numbers were all old because he’d used some program to transfer all his info from an old phone to the iPhone? As if! Busted!

Category: Best Upside-down Cameo

Good news: Web searches work flawlessly during time travel. Bad news: Someone Dan knew (and loved?) is dead.

The screen on Dan’s iPhone is sort of accurate…except for the fact that the Home button is at the top.

The ill-fated TV drama Journeyman premiered on September 24, 2007, a week before the first-gen iPhone hit the market, so who can blame the props department for getting a few things inverted? When the main character, Dan, leaps through time, the first thing he does is check his iPhone to learn the date—or see if cell signals exist at all. The phone functions as a latter-day Great Gazoo, a pint-sized anachronism Dan can use to prove his time-shifting abilities. But the real mystery is: How does he get it to work so well when he’s holding it upside-down?

Category: Best Work-From-Home Tool

Willows snaps a pic of a murder victim’s burned-out car so Grissom can “be” at the scene while he’s at home coughing and sniffling.

What we learned from CSI: When you get sick, you stay home—even if you’re Gil Grissom. When Grissom is felled by the flu in season 8, episode 12 (“Grissom’s Divine Comedy”), he sends Catherine Willows to a crime scene in his place, asking her to photograph the evidence with her iPhone so he can see what she’s seeing. Luckily for the show’s, uh, credibility, Willows doesn’t feed her shots into any of the space-age analysis tools back at the lab, 
which would beg the question: How much forensics data can you get from a 
2-megapixel image?

Category: Sneakiest Santa Ploy


”Either that cost more than 25 bucks, or I’m seriously starting to doubt Steve Jobs’ business strategies.”

Who’s the baddest doctor of them all? In his eponymous series, NBC Universal’s House tricks everyone into thinking he is his or her secret Santa, then “borrows” an iPhone and pretends someone has given it to him, so his colleagues fly into a jealous frenzy…or something. This show is nearly impossible to follow if you’re not on the same painkillers as House. The point is, the iPhone is a serious object of desire--even for medical pros who could easily afford to buy their own.

And in two final categories...

Category:  Best Non-iPhone Sexy Accoutrement


Carrie Bradshaw’s MacBook completes her.

And the award goes to Carrie and her PowerBook—which she finally replaced with a white MacBook in the movie version of Sex and the City. No woman has been so closely identified with the tool of her trade since Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed Electra (and you thought we were going to say Pandora and her box).

Category: Funniest Apple Skewering


“Mom, Dad, our mall got a Mapple Store!”

Lisa and the Mapple Store on The Simpsons. Ouch. Just ouch. Still, we haven’t indulged in this much knowing laughter since Daniel Lyons’ Fake Steve Jobs blog. See: www.hulu.com/watch/46753/the-simpsons-mapple-store. And if you need more, try not to pee your pants watching Bart sabotage a Steve Mobs address. “Mom, Dad, our mall got a Mapple Store!”