About 2 minutes per month for calls or texts or whatever else they are supposed to do.
I mostly use it as an mp3 player for podcasts. That use is maybe five to ten hours a week.
Zero
My work phone is my only phone. I use it almost 100% for work email. I talk on it maybe once or twice a month. Every once in a great while I use it for a work related Internet search.
I have had an iPhone for 4-5 years and have never sent or received a text. I have never found a use case.
Yeah… I just counted and I’ve sent and receieved around 100 messages today, between fifteen conversations. That’s pretty normal for me. It’s not because I need data to add to the spreadsheet I keep, stalking the movements of everyone I know. It’s mostly “Hey, heard you’ve got a presentation today, good luck” or “What was the name of that restaurant you guys loved that you were talking about last month?” or “Anyone want to go see this film next week?”.
I could stop, of course. At anytime, I could just stop phone communications with my friends and colleagues. But why? It takes me two seconds to send a nice friendly little message, or respond to “Are you coming to yoga tonight?”.
I’d estimate that total, my phone is probably is use for six hours a day. Take away music, pocasts, email, random internet-ing, etc., I’d guess about an hour a day is actual text and Whatsapp use, and maybe a brief phone call here or there.
Where to begin?
I don’t have a smart phone. The cool abilities never seemed worth the price.
Not the purchase price, but the monthly price. Without a service plan, a smartphone is basically a brick. Well, not a brick. And you can still use wifi. I do have an android tablet that uses wifi.
But my phone is just a phone. I have one of those pay-as-you-go plans. I have to add $20 to my account every 90 days to keep the phone on, then am charged $0.15 per minute or per text.
I got up to well over $300 in balance on that phone. Then my niece started texting me.
I signed up for a plan where I get 300 texts a month for $5. I send or receive about 6 texts a week on personal business, about 3 for work. I receive a couple of phone calls a month from work, and a couple of times a year from family. Less than 6 times a year I’ll use it for something like calling my brother to say I’m buying take-out food and what kind of sandwich do you want?
That costs me $120 a year. So you can see why I’m not that interested in paying $35 a month.
30 years ago, they were installing cable TV in the town where I lived. My dad looked into it, but decided against it. His problem was, while HBO sounded like something he’d really enjoy, you had to pay for Basic Cable before they’d let you buy HBO, and Basic Cable offered NO stations we didn’t already get. He just couldn’t justify paying $10 a month for something he already got for free to get the privilege of paying $12 a month for something he might like. And while $12 a month for HBO seemed like a fair price, $22 a month for HBO did not.
If I was already on one of those phone plans that costs $100 a month, adding $35 a month for a smartphone data plan might seem attractive. But paying $35 a month for, essentially, the ability to use my tablet from places that don’t have wifi, and also to use it as a phone, just doesn’t seem worth it. I spend like 90% of my time at work (whee there is wifi) or at home (where there is wifi), and a lot of the rest of the time in places where there is wifi.
My boss wants to buy me a smartphone, and I keep trying to explain to him that I just don’t have a use for one.
I spend most of my time on my ‘phone’ reading.
Perhaps I short phone call a day. Maybe a text or two. I check email, but usually use a computer for that.
My Wife works for the same company and we sometimes just use work email to comunicate during the day.
Still have a land line at the house since the cell service is a bit scetchy. It is improving though.