Let me tell you about four wonderful letters: A, D, H and D.
(And you can tell me about three other letters: O, C andD).
It depends. When I want to order takeout, I’ll always use voice. Most small restaurants don’t have a way to take takeout orders via text.
Also, occasionally my wife wants to vent or complain about something. That works better over voice than text. I can hear her emotions.
I usually have my phone with me. It controls a lot of stuff around my house.
I could just talk to Siri from the Homepods distributed around the house, but I just prefer to do it on my phone. It’s more reliable.
I’m probably the reverse of most people in that I keep my cell phone charging on the end table next to my couch. This is the location I occupy most of the time during the day when I’m working, corresponding, reading, or watching TV/social media.
When I go to bed, I leave it in the same place. If you try to reach me on my cell between 10:00P and 7:00A, you won’t. It’s two rooms away from me.
I never carry it with me around the house. Frankly, I don’t want to talk to most people and I’m not particularly interested in texting or social media. I’m pretty much a “call and talk with me by appointment only.” Want an appointment? E-mail me.
I’ve had too many “emergency” calls from my kids to ever be completely unreachable, even now that they’re all adults and doing well.
ETA: I see you specified “cell phone.” That leaves open the possiblity that you have a landline for emergency calls.
Works for me as well!
What types of 10pm-7am “emergencies” and how often?
12:00 to 2:00 a.m. calls from the state troopers. Not too often. One was a car accident. One was a DUI arrest. Calls I’d rather not miss.
C - D - O
There I fixed it for you; they’re now in proper alphabetic order. 
If they get busted after midnight, you may very well not be able to get them before 7am by the time they’re done with processing.
That’s only three different letters, plus a duplicate.
That’s only two other letters, plus a duplicate.
(Oh, right…)
AND you have a record of what was said that you can go back and check, e.g., Augie’s BBQ @ 2:00 PM next Friday, without having to write it down on an elusive piece of paper.
Me, too. Although most of my correspondents are old like me, I can’t control how they text me. I do use some shorthand like BTW, TTYL, and stuff. But I refuse do things like “C U L8TR.”
I’d feel very insecure without having my phone next to the bed (charging) at night. I’ve lived alone for 25-ish years, 12 of those in the country in the middle of 16 acres with only one nearby neighbor. I never needed to call them, but wanted the opportunity to be there.
When my mother was alive, I needed the phone nearby. I kept the ringer off, but I looked at the phone if when I got up to pee during the night. One time there was a voice message from her in the middle of the night. (She was 90-ish-- no cell phone, just a land line.) Confused about the time of day, she had gone down to the street at 1:00 am and waited at the curb for her caregiver (who naturally didn’t come) and called me to get me to complain and investigate. Did she notice that it was the middle of the night? Apparently not.
Now that I am not potentially on the receiving end of such phone calls, I still want the phone near me at night with the ringer/notifications off.
I don’t normally carry my cell phone with me around the house. If I’m going to be somewhere ( in the front or back yard, on the second floor or in the basement ) for more than a couple of minutes, I’ll take it but not if I’m going to the basement to throw a load of laundry into the washer.
I do not usually bring it to the bedroom at night - if I have to get up insanely early , I might use the phone rather than changing the alarm clock. I do bring it to the bedroom when I have reason to - for example, when my daughter was pregnant with #2 and I was to be the babysitter for #1 when she went to the hospital.
I charge my phone overnight at my bed, but I do put it on mute.
And the things that make a computer or tablet more usable for some people than a phone are the peripherals and the interfaces. In my case, I seem to fat-finger about half of my attempts at keystrokes on a phone. It’s not worth it to me to try to make my phone work as a computer.
That’s fine, but it is, as the kids say, a “skill issue”. It doesn’t make a phone any less of a computer, though.
As I mentioned either earlier in this thread or another thread, I have “murderer’s thumbs.” It’s almost physically impossible for me to avoid typos. It’s just so annoying. Any skill I’ve developed is outweighed by my physical handicap. No biggie really, but I don’t like being called an idiot or a luddite because I don’t text someone.
We now have lots of different ways to communicate with people, either as individuals or en masse.
The advantage of this is that everybody can pick the style that suits them. The disadvantage is that, as no one style suits everybody, there’s no one way to reach everybody, or even most people; and pretty much everybody knows somebody they have to communicate with, but who won’t communicate in their preferred style.
I love email. Suits me very well: written record, the people communicating can be on different schedules, can be done on the device of your choice with the keyboard (or voice assistant) of your choice. But half the people I need to communicate with don’t check their email reliably, or sometimes at all; and probably about 10% of them never got email in the first place. (I’m aware that that last one depends on who you know.)
(And want to put a notice somewhere where your whole community can see, for instance, where you had to move the farmers’ market to? No longer possible.)
I miss classifieds. They were very useful.
The aggregate of different tools that replaced them have some advantages, but he classifieds were simple.
Exactly.
And you could stick an ad in one or at most a couple local papers; and anybody who was paying attention at all would see it. Especially if you went a bit larger than the standard classified.
(They’re not quite dead – local papers still run them, in paper and online – but they’re now almost all legal notices, and a lot more people aren’t reading them at all.)
Yeah baby, I am packing it.
I have even been known to leave it on the desk, fully charged and accessable to children.
That’s just how I roll.
Yeah. It doesn’t have a 9-track tape drive or card reader but it’s got 1000 times more random access storage than used to be available on a computer that took up a whole floor of a building. So it’s a really little computer that’s more technologically advanced than a Star Trek communicator. Except for the range, but there isn’t a Federation Starship within 1 million km of earth right now so it doesn’t help.