I can’t keep up with my dumb phone. So a smart phone wouldn’t be a good purchase for me.
But I really don’t need one anyway now that I have a mobile hotspot for my Kindle HD. I’ve got a Skype app so I can use it as a mobile phone, if need be. And this is just all kinds of perfect for me. If I had a smart phone, a Kindle (I’ve actually got two Kindles), AND a laptop, that would be too many gadgets in my life.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a camera, though? I replaced the pto drive belt on our lawn tractor the other day. The manual was in the house, so I took a picture of the belt/pulley arrangement and took it inside to compare. Last week I ran into someone and couldn’t remember their name. I texted a pic to my gf and she told me.
I think I could live without my smartphone but I use it so much for GPS navigation in and around Houston that I’d need to get a Garmin or something to replace it. Otherwise I just use it for calling and texting, and frankly I could live without the texting. Sometimes I use it to browse the web, play games, kill time on The Dope, etc… however I could do all that on a tablet I have.
No smartphone.
Having access to a tiny internet screen everywhere isn’t worth having to shove a huge brick on my pocket instead of a tiny fip phone, or paying several hundred times what data costs at my computer at home.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Herein lies the advantage of waiting before you jump on a new technology…I waited, and skipped CDs entirely, going from cassette tapes directly to mp3. Much, much better, and I didn’t have a gigantic collection of CDs to get rid of, too. And I waited and didn’t get a smartphone and ended up getting something I wanted much better…a tablet.
Neither time did I really wait deliberately, but it just so happened I was neither willing to invest in CDs nor a smartphone, so it worked out for the best. Let the people who jump on technology be the beta testers; I’ll get there eventually. 
My iPhone 3GS is about 3.5" wide by 4.5" long and is less than a half inch thick. It weighs less than 5 ounces. Is that a brick? I only know that I have trouble remembering which pocket it’s in and have to feel around with my fingers to find it.
My device is an inch taller than my wallet, but less width and half the height, making it more pocket-able. All charges are $30 a month.
Not trying to convince you of otherwise, but these aren’t serious hurdles, if there ever is a temptation to own one.
The thing I do least with my smartphone is make calls.
The other functions are very useful and important for me.
Smartphones continue to remind me of 8 track tape players, FAX machines, and other technology where I liked the general idea but thought the ideal implementation wasn’t there yet.
It could be wishful thinking and/or I’m waiting for the boat on the wrong pier or something, but the smartphone I’m waiting for will work like this:
• I no longer have two separate digital devices, a cellphone and a computer. Instead, I should come to my office and dock my phone in a cradle of some sort. Three or four enormous monitors should light up now with resolutions of 1920 x 1200 or whatever… acres and acres of screen real estate at my disposal. My full sized keyboard and my mouse should work with it.
• It runs MacOS X… not a stripped-down version, but the full item, since this is, after all, my computer, not just a mobile device. I can launch Photoshop, run my FileMaker databases, print to my printers, scan from my flatbed scanner, open an Excel spreadsheet, run my word processor, join my boss’s virtual private network and download a folder’s worth of source files to compile in my development environment, edit video footage in Final Cut Pro, and run a Windows 7 sessions in Parallels. I do several of these things simultaneously and can see what I’m doing in multiple windows. In fact, I can drag the URL from a Word document into the browser address bar and drag the photo from the sample document into the Photoshop window.
• I select the phone number listed on the customer support page of the company profile web page and hit the hotkey combo I’ve defined and that number dials; it is of course still a cell phone. But it’s a cell phone that freaking works with my other applications, providing telephony support to each and every environment, mediated by the OS as something my computer simply does.
• Time to go to lunch. I grab my computer/phone and the monitors darken; the cellphone screen gives me an interface that is a sensible one for working with a postage-stamp sized screen and absence of mouse, etc. It may resemble iOS or it may not but if, during the course of waiting on line at Chipotle, I feel the need to check to see if Layer 6 of that huge honking TIFF file has the path around the model’s eyebrows saved as a selection, I can still switch processes and bring Photoshop to the front and, within the limitations of what I can do with my fat finger and a tiny phone-sized screen, make use of it.
• All my cellphone voicemails are saved as .mp3 files, in folders timestamped and named for the caller and the category in which, in my easy-to-use computer-based phone mgmt app, I’ve designated that caller, and speech recognition has simultaneously converted them all to plain text to enable easy searching. I can optionally record calls in progress the same way. I have every business phone call I’ve made in the last few years on my computer as sound and text.
• The cute little 2 TB solid state drive in this thing is adequate for most mobile purposes but I have an array of massive SATA drives at the office for the big files. This thing’s cradle-dock has a nice array of ports on it: firewire, USB, HDMI, VGA, sound in/ out, PC Card, ethernet, all that stuff.
I cheat:
my phone is dumb and my tablet is large.
I have a 10" Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 tablet (nice snappy name, Samsung), an iPod Touch…and a cheesy little flip-open Tracfone, Like most of the other posters, I have no desire at all to pay monthly fees.
When they hit unlimited talk, text and data for $25 a month, I’ll get one.
This probably isn’t the thread for it, so I won’t write it out, but there are already some implementations close to what you’ve described. Sadly, it comes across as a gimmick at some levels, and consumers aren’t ready to adopt it, but it’s been close.
Motorola tried to move in that direction, with the Atrix:
Other’s have ran a full Linux Desktop, rather well. With some developer backing and 3rd party applications, the rest would be pretty doable, in some capacity.
Yes, I can easily see how the fact that you don’t own a smartphone could be used to blackmail you.
Incidentally, what’s the difference between posting in a public poll and making a comment in the same thread?
I have a flip phone and a prepaid plan with AT&T. I only make a dozen calls with it a month.
I have no need or interest in a smart phone.
I’ve had smartphones for the past few years (currently using an HTC One S). I have some e-books loaded on it for reading on the Metro in case I don’t have my tablet or dead-tree reading material on hand. The Internet functions occasionally come in handy, though they’re problematic on the Metro.*
If I’m actively expecting to want to surf the Net, read e-books, etc away from home, I bring the tablet (a Toshiba Thrive, which is a bit bulky and low-res by current standards but generally gets the job done). I’m thinking of upgrading to something with a better display, now that I’ve started buying comics in PDF form – while I certainly don’t read Knights of the Dinner Table for the pictures, the atrocious dithering of some of the greytones is a bit distracting.
*Skald: Can you give me a reference for a good forensic-accounting team? I can look up the name of the bureaucrat who keeps extending Metro’s all-carrier-access deadline; all they’ll have to do is press the anal probe deep enough to make him cough up the bribe money and the name of Verizon’s bagman.
I’m hardly ever away from my desktop computer. I don’t even have a commute during which I might use it.
I want a smart phone, but I’m too cheap to pay for the data plan. FWIW, I rarely use my phone. I could save a bunch of money, and not restrict my usage, if I just had a Tracfone.
I am starting to seriously consider getting a smart phone. The cost to buy the phone doesn’t dissuade me but the monthly charges do. On top of that, I might not be able to get much us of it at home, since I’m just about at the edge of cell reception here. I sometimes have to walk to the top of the hill if I want to talk on my dumb phone. There are a few times in the last year when a smart phone really would have come in handy. In April I was stuck in traffic for hours with an road atlas not detailed enough to find a good alternate route. Just last month my truck broke down in a strange city and I had a devil of a time finding garages, motels, and restaurants. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wished I could use GasBuddy on the road, or check the closing times of businesses. I haven’t yet talked myself into it, but I’m getting close.
I don’t have a smartphone, I have a very small flip-phone that suits me just fine. It does calls and texts, and it can take a small pic if I need to. Other than that, I have absolutely no justification for a smartphone.
My phone provider has a plan that gives me unlimited texts for £10 per month (I’m in the UK) and would give me a small data allowance for £15 per month so the cost itself is not exactly prohibitive.
I can’t really say why I don’t want one except that I can’t see any need. I have asked my friends what they use their smartphones for and it seems that the most common answer is facebook or twitter. I am a kind of private person really, I don’t want that kind of intrusion in my life so I am happy not to go down that route. It also annoys me tremendously that on my daily commute, I see so many people who get off the bus or the train and immediately the phone comes out as if they can’t last two minutes without telling the entire world they’ve arrived in the city.
I’m sure if I actively investigated the colossal number of things I could use a smartphone for, I would be hooked and I’d wonder how I survived without one, but nothing yet is pushing me to take that first step. I should point out that I don’t have a tablet either, and I rarely use the internet at home in the evenings because I’ve spent all day looking at a computer and my eyes deserve a bit of a rest!
I do not have a smartphone. I’m unsure why I’d need one. I do use a cellphone to place calls, but unless I’ve instructed callers to call me, as in a message left on voicemail; nobody ever calls me on my cell. I ignore texts. My clients and friends know that, and they also know that they can only reach me by telephone.
I can get my sports scores tomorrow morning from the online newspaper, via my PC. Indeed, I can read the news, via my online PC. I don’t Twitter, I don’t feel the need to text what I’m doing every five minutes (“Spoons is at the sports bar,” “Spoons is cheering for the 49ers,” "“Spoons is disappointed that the Niners didn’t win”), and so on. Some may disagree, but I feel that this is a stupid waste of bandwidth.
I deal with people. Real, live people. We speak on the phone. If they say, “I’ll send you a text,” I tell them no, you’ll call me and speak with me in person. Given that they rely on me for legal representation, I kind of call the shots in this regard.
I have a cellphone. I don’t need a smartphone.