Don’t you want one that’s edible? Or at least non-toxic? 
The point is, the extraneous features can get in the way, and oftentimes aren’t very well executed. Never mind the fact that you apparently spent a good bit more for your car than you needed to, if it came with GPS and a sunroof.
It’s not that I’m a Luddite, but I just don’t need a phone that accesses the Internet, takes pictures, recognizes my voice or plays my favorite tunes. I just need a phone. I never listen to music unless I’m at home or in my car; I have a closet filled with cameras of all kinds should I ever want to take a photo (I usually don’t); I have high-speed internet access at work, home and school. I don’t even want a cell phone that stores voice messages, since I can never recover them anyway.
It would be nice to have a phone that remembers to turn itself on when it slides into my pocket and off when it hits the top of my dresser. Beyond that – nope, just a phone.
Before I even had a cell phone, I had a wonderful way of getting all of that information. I called it “planning ahead.” I looked up the business in a phone book, called to find out where it was, wrote down the directions on a piece of paper with a pencil. I’m not saying it was better, I’m just saying that at no time before cell phone technology became affordable and available did I ever wander aimlessly looking for a place I thought might exist wishing I had an electronic thingy that would walk me to where I needed to go – I used critical thinking skills to reason out how best to get the information, got it, used it. Usually, this involved interacting with other people (not always successfully, I’ll admit) and led to any number of wonderful discoveries I’d not have otherwise made.
The new technology is truly marvelous, but it’s just a tool, after all. There is nothing you can do with it that couldn’t be done before. Maybe slower and less perfectly, but it could still be done. As for mapping – frankly, that’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Follow directions to my home address on any online map reference, and you’ll end up on the tee box of a golf course over a mile away from my house. You still have to call me and get directions.
I want a simple plan to go with my simple phone. How about no contract and just pay for the calls you make, like my land line. Where are the regulators? Why didn’t they expand their protection to cell phones?
Well, sometimes your plans change mid-trip (like, I dunno, you really start craving some General Tso’s Chicken), so if you don’t have your phone book with you, that can be problematic. Used to be phone booths all over the place had phone books in them, but it seems that that has become rather rare nowadays (both the phone booths and the phone books attached to them). I suppose you could go into a gas station and ask the clerk if he knows of any good Chinese restaurants nearby. 
I dont see how those extra features get in the way. I cant think of one phone that doesnt have a contacts button on the main screen. Or a phone that you have to go through X ammount of steps to dial a phone number. If you wanna make a call push the numbers then hit send. If you wanna see your contacts 97% of the time its going to be the top left or top right button on your phone to bring up the menu.
Now ya’ got it! Consarnit, somma yew whippersnappers is purty durn smart!
Seriously, yeah, that’s how we did it in pre-cell days. Usually, the locals us gave us really good tips on where the best eats were (if it’s restaurants you’re looking for.) The down side, of course, was a bad restaurant – or a starring role in somebody’s personal slasher movie.
Is that what it’s called? It’s a wonder how I went anywhere before I had maps on a cell phone. It must be nice to be so structured that your destinations never change, you never get lost, and you always have time to plan where you’re going.
+1 to Raguleader. Sometimes plans change. Sometimes you’re not near a phonebook. Sometimes you’re not near a computer. Sometimes you don’t even know where you are. Sometimes you want to know where something might be that you hadn’t planned on going to. Sometimes that sort of info isn’t on a paper map. Sometimes a paper map don’t have enough detail because the scale is too large. Sometimes a paper map doesn’t help at all because the scale is too small and you’re not even on the map anymore. I also can’t speak for most, but I don’t exactly carry a phonebook with me. It’s during these “sometimes” that I find having access to all this information on a device in my pocket to be not only amazing, but incredibly helpful, and quite a lot more convenient than my days of having a “basic cell phone”. I also think that, like it or not, this sort of feature will find its way onto even the most basic cell phones in the years to come.
My cell phone has an MP3 player and a 2 megapixel camera, but I still have to “plan ahead” or go home to check the internet before going somewhere.
Someday when I have more money for unlimited data transfer…
All I need or want from my phone is the ability to make phone calls. Text messaging is also handy, as is message recording. Camera, MP3 player, internet browsing, TV, games, etc. are all completely unnecessary to me.
Now, I don’t care if my phone has all those features. What I do care about is a) getting charged for all those useless features, and b) features that turn themselves on and drain the battery down to nothing before I notice it (i.e., the *$&%ing camera button mounted on the outside of my phone).
Provide a phone that’s designed intelligently and a service that charges for what I actually use, and you’ve got a customer for life.
The Apple iPhone is actually very simple to operate. I think a lot of people who are looking for a simple, easy-to-use phone would be quite happy with it. It is very different from other “smartphones”.
It was only a year ago we replaced our old StarTAC. I think the antenna finally broke off. I paid $200 or thereabouts for it so we kept it until the bitter end.
It’s also absurdly expensive. $600 covers the cost of my current phone, plus the first two years of usage.
I’m also put off by the lack of a keypad. The touch-screen interface is nifty and fun and all, but I don’t want to have to rely entirely on my sense of vision to dial my phone. If I wanted to do that, I would have kept my Helio Fin with it’s entirely smooth keypad (and propensity for freezing up and overheating, the first phone I ever got an overheating message on)
I made my cell phone really simple recently. I accidentally got it wet, with the result that the lower four fifths of the screen got busted. No image. Voila - no more access to any advanced functions. Then, a while later, I dropped it on the floor, and oddly enough, probably because of the previously inflicted water damage, this caused several buttons to stop working. All I can do with it now is to turn it on and off, *dial *numbers to call out (can’t even access my contacts), and pick up incoming calls when it rings. No text messaging. No camera. No internet. No bullshit. I can’t even see if I have any missed calls, because of the busted screen. Through clumsiness, I’ve sculpted the thing into a luddite’s perfect dream phone. Also, I pretty much never bring it with me outside the house anymore, as I’m becoming a bit absent-minded, and prone to losing cell phones (as well as anything else that isn’t chained or nailed to my person) - I’ve lost two in the past year or so. So, it mostly just sits in one location on my desk, doing mostly nothing. These developements have, I swear, reduced the amount of stress in my life by about 80%.
Now I just need to come up with a way to break my e-mail account.
I resisted getting a Treo because I knew I would never use all the features. I have no desire to get email on the go, or use the internet (even if it didn’t cost $80 a month :eek: ). But I loved my Palm, and it seemed so foolish to me to carry around two devices. Both had contact information, and invariably, I would want to call someone that I didn’t have entered into my Contacts on the cell phone. So there I’d be with two electronic devices open, manually entering numbers into the phone from the Palm.
So, I caved and last year got the Treo. Words cannot describe how much I love it. Because you can download free Desktop software, there is no need to enter contact information (or calendar information) into the phone portion. You just type it into the computer – and then sync your phone with the Desktop! Of course you can still enter stuff onto the phone, if need be; the keyboard isn’t horrible to use (but admittedly not as nice as the iPhone).
The iPhone is very intuitive and I would love having one. But I must have the Palm platform. The use the calendar daily. With a full-time job and three children and a husband (not to mention an ex-husband who has two of my childen sometimes) and all their activities to keep up with, I would be lost without it! I don’t listen to music all the time, so while an iPod would be interesting, it’s not for me. So sadly, an iPhone doesn’t meet my needs. Maybe someday they’ll branch out into my market segment!
As another wonderful bonus, I can also sync the phone with my home computer, so my work computer, home and Treo all have identical information.
Oh and because I’ve never switched plans, I still get my phone service for $30/month.
I’ve always had maps in my car. And phone book(s), as necessary. Pen and paper, tool kit, that kind of stuff. Of course, I was a newspaper reporter for over 20 years, so I just always had those things with me. And what kind of planning does it take to look up a couple of restaurants and call them before you go? We did it all the time. Yeah, we spent our lives thinking ahead. I still do. Like I said, the new technology is neat stuff and it does make life easier, but life wasn’t all that hard before.
Hee. I have the simplest phone - a TracFone.
I do want an iPhone. But I want it sans phone capabilities. I want everything else without the phone in it.
I was with the OP. In fact, I went from a polychrome LG flip model to a simple Nokia, which I liked better because you almost have to use two hands to answer a flip model.
But now that there are phones that play music, I am not going back. My officemate just got a Chocalate and let me listen to it…it plays great. So I’ve just taken my free upgrade with my service provider and will be getting a full-keyboard Samsung with music capability.