The cellular telephone was a device for transmitting and receiving voice calls using radio signals. What people are carrying around today are not phones, they are palm top computers that have the ability to emulate or pretend to be a phone, but their primary purpose is to allow access to media. This is where the money is, bandwidth for streaming a baseball game to you while you are driving home.
The desk top computer was comprised of a separate monitor, discrete speakers, and could use telephone lines to send and receive data. Technology advanced, and the laptop computer evolved, with the monitor and speakers integrated into one device. The palm top incorporates far more computer power than the old desktop computers ever dreamed of, as well as speakers for stereo sound. Because watching media is the primary purpose of the palm top, the screen sizes are growing steadily.
Powering these devices takes a lot of energy, so the batteries are getting larger, too. Especially since the palm tops are talking to the cell towers constantly.
The components needed to make a cellular telephone can now be put into a writing pen with room to spare. We have been conned into lugging around a bulky, heavy device so that companies can pick our pockets more easily. We don’t use them to talk to each other very often, but we are constantly paying attention to them, and paying for them.
They are not making us smart, and they are not telephones! But I can no longer get a dedicated cellular telephone, it seems they don’t make them anymore. I have to carry the World Wide Web on my hip if I want to be able to communicate with someone, while selling my privacy. Advertising aimed at my profile will connect with my palm top when I am approaching a business that subscribes to a media service. My movements are tracked because of that palm top. Too bad that the palm top can not warn us when we are about to walk into a post.
You have access to the sum of the world’s knowledge, every book ever written, every song ever sung, every TV show or movie ever made, every painting ever painted, in your pocket.
The “smart” thing comes from being a general purpose computing device with a reasonable interface for running not just the built-in apps but ones you’ve decided to add.
A classic dumb phone (which, as mentioned, are still being made) only comes with a handful of applications, a more limited interface, etc.
So, for example, you can add to a smart phone an app to show you the night sky at your time and location. (And if you’re clever enough, you could write and install such an app.) Can’t reasonably do that with a dumb phone.
Ditto smart TVs. They have an interface (usually Android) that allows you to install your choice from a very large set of apps. You can play (modest) games directly on the TV, for instance. With a dumb TV you need to add on a game box.
It’s nice to be able to have a term to distinguish the two categories. The main problem with “smart” is the implication that they are all about AI. They can use AI assistants but that’s a secondary effect.
Since it sounds like you have been around as a functioning adult prior to 2000 or so, let me remind you this is not the true evolutionary history of the “smartphone”.
If you look in Wikipedia, the term “smartphone” is first documented in print in 1995 to market AT&T’s “PhoneWriter Communicator”, a portable device that married cellular digital data with functions for email, address book, calculator, and phone calls.
Since it was designed and marketed by AT&T, still largely synonymous with “The Phone Company”, they used the term “smart” phone to contrast it with the kind of phone that could only dumbly do one thing, make a phone call, even if it was a cell phone, or mobile phone.
The device went nowhere, though, as many “so far ahead of its time people didn’t see the point of it immediately” things do, plus the whole “it had to wait until screens looked better and data signals cheaper and more reliable to be useful”.
BTW, nobody has ever said “cellular TELE-phone” in my nigh-50-year-old-man memory; before the “pocket brick” style cell phones were “car phones”, cellular phones being too large to fit except in a suitcase for carrying around (like what cops sometimes where shown to use, as I recently spotted in a rewatching of the 1986 film Ruthless People).
And yes. What we now call “smartphones” is a legacy term now used to describe “pocket computers that can use high-speed wireless data networks”.
This is mostly because of the BlackBerry being so quickly adopted as the first widely used device of this kind (from 2000-2003) that other manufacturers had to reach back to that term from AT&T to describe “our cellular enabled PDA - like a BlackBerry, but it’s not a BlackBerry - it’s a, it’s a smartphone!”
Hey, that’s what a text-entered Google search told me as well, if I typed “why are smartphones called smart”. As the text from a user response from a “Quora” question.
“Bulky, heavy”? It is my understanding that smartphones come small enough to even fit in the pockets of some women’s pants. And it weighs about what a Zippo and a pack of Reds used to weigh, and all they ever gave me were increased risk of cancer, heart disease and premature wrinkles.
So the OP prefers what? Tiny cellphones for phone use only, and when you need a computermachine you damn well can go sit down behind a laptop?
Don’t know about yours, but mine has something called “airplane mode” that tells it to STOP talking to cell towers and wifi. Can really save on the battery life. Also good for when I don’t want interruptions. Mine also has this amazing feature called “an off switch” which REALLY saves on battery life. That’s the easy stuff.
If you want to shock the millennials that a boomer can find the settings you can also cut down on what various apps are doing in the background which also saves battery life.
The upshot is that I only need to charge my cellphone every 3-4 days. YMMV.
Speak for yourself - mine is helping me refresh my French and teaching me some basic Spanish. The crossword game is also some good mental stimulation. Then there is being able to look things up on the internet.
Perhaps the problem isn’t your smartphone but rather how you’re using it.
Nonsense. You DO have to look for/ask for them. I find it best to go to a corporate store run by a provider like AT&T, Verison, etc. and specifically ask for a “dumb phone” or “flip phone” emphasizing that you want just phone (or just phone and texting). If you go to a franchise store or small stand-alone business where they depend wholly on commission/mark-up no, you’re not likely to get a flipper but I assure you they are out there.
“Off switch”.
Also, if you’re REALLY paranoid, you can take the battery out of your phone.
Your objections are based on a lack of knowledge and failure to RTFM.
Yeah, except most boomers happily use smartphones without issue for email, phone calls, texts, photos, various retail apps, etc…
This is a centenarian shaking his fist at us and wheezing at us to get off his lawn, while he’s actually sitting in a chair at an old folks’ home somewhere with no lawn to be seen.