23 thoughts on “Smart Phones”

  1. “As I’ve noted in the past, young people have no conception of what good phone service is like.”

    That may be; but even the very worst phone service gives them the opportunity to spend all day on their cell phones without having to read books.

  2. One thing that happened is that the maximum cell sizes (range to cell tower) were much larger in the analog (AMPS) days compared to today’s digital CDMA-based techniques (~50km vs. 15km). There are vast areas in the west that once had coverage (though only a few simultaneous connections) that no longer have any cell service. You need only go 80 miles from Washington DC to find spotty to no coverage.

  3. ROFL! I’m amazed it took them so long to figure this out. 🙂

    I use a dumb phone, and have for years. There are a lot of reasons. First is size and shape; I go for the smallest flipphone I can find, because you don’t need a case, it’s easier in the pocket, and it fits better when in use.

    I block SMS (I hate it) so I use the keypad for one thing only; numbers, so small is fine. I don’t use it to web browse or e-mail, so the tiny screen is fine. It’s very durable (good thing, because I’m a klutz) and one charge lasts for days even if I leave it on. (I most often power it off, because I dislike being bugged by phone calls when out). I do have to deal with clients. That’s why I have voicemail. If I’m expecting an important call, I turn the phone on, no problem. GPS aps? No thanks, I prefer a dedicated GPS for my car.

    Oh, and I pay a grand total of $100 a *year* for cell service, and the phone was “free”. That gives me plenty of minutes, far more than I use.

    The only time I miss smartphone-type features is when traveling, but I have a notebook for that.

    2. It takes way less time to read a text than jump through hoops to listen to a bunch of voice mails.

  4. Absolutely. I’ve mentioned this to many a friend in the past. Proof? Make a call to someone from any distance on your wifi/cellular capable smartphone using its cell service. Talk to them for a bit then hang up and called them back through the wifi component using an app like Skype. The trick is that your party on the other end must also be using Skype over wifi. The audio difference is night vs day. Also most people don’t realize how much audio quality they are sacrificing in that “last 10 feet” if they use a DECT 6.0 cordless phone. Or any cordless phone from the 900 MHz analogs to the 5GHz digitals. The only exception was the older 50MHz band “ATT” style analog FM cordless phones from the 80s. Don’t believe me? Plug an old wired phone (if you still have one hanging around your house and not so old as to be non touch- tone) directly into the phone jack of your IP telephone modem in place of the cordless base station and make a call or two. You’ll be amazed at what you can hear, esp. if you call to someone who is also not sacrificing that last 10 feet by using either a wired analog phone on their end or if you are placing a call to a Skype number that comes in over their smartphone’s wifi + audio. It’s really a shame what we’ve come to live with. There’s a whole generation that accepts this technological anachronistic compression as the norm…

  5. I’ll stick with my smart phone. Much better business tool than the dumb phones, and massively better than land lines. And my i5s has lasted much longer than any of the dumb phones I had over the last quarter century including the so-called milspec ones.

    1. She finds it “alarming” that people spend 4.7 hours a day on their smartphones. Obviously, smartphones are so useless that people use them constantly!

      But she gets better battery life with a device that has no data-processing capability to speak of, no graphics, no camera, no data storage, no maps or navigation, and sits in her pocket, unused, most of the time. And it’s cheaper!

      But she doesn’t go far enough: Why not just carve messages on rocks? Rocks are free! And they last for millions of years!

      It should be no mystery that people are willing to pay more for a device that has more utility.

      There’s also a freeloader effect. The only person I know who still uses a dumb phone is calling me constantly asking for map directions, weather forecasts, concert information, etc. which most people have right at their fingertips.

  7. Man, you old fogies amaze me sometimes. “I just want my old potato phone”. Meanwhile, the latest smartphones are almost powerful enough to be laptop replacements.

    1. I think of my Galaxy S5 as Jerry Pournelle’s Pocket Computer from The Mote in God’s Eye brought to life. For most of my purposes it is a desktop replacement.

      I read my Kindle books on it. I don’t buy dead-tree editions anymore. Also, I read and replied to this post with it.

      1. And vice versa.

        I’d like that conversation, but please note that my phone is a “flagship” and may have hardware capabilities you might not be thinking of.

      2. That’s good, because many of them are already probably wrong, and most of the rest will be in a few years, when all you’ll have to do is wireless connect to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

    3. almost powerful enough to be laptop replacements.

      No, they’re powerful enough to be *supercomputer* replacements.

    4. My old potato phone reliably delivered far better audio than any cell phone I have ever owned using over-the-air cellular service. From analog FM to 4G-LTE, been there, done ’em all… That’s just a fact. Again, prove it to yourself. Use a wired phone plugged directly into your IP phone modem or call someone on your smartphone over Skype + WiFi and make sure they answer the same way. You’ll be amazed. And then totally pissed….

  8. I hate phones in general. I agree with everything Rand wrote. However, I recently got a smartphone because several apps are so valuable to me as to outweigh the privacy and other negatives. For example, the ability to access in a doctor’s office notes shared with a geographically distant sibling about a parent’s medical history is golden. Waze saved me hours the first few times I used it. Each of us will have a unique cost/benefit calculation.

    BTW, you can configure a smart phone to eliminate annoying sounds. You can also use prepaid cell service where you pay only for minutes/data used.

  9. My iPhone is also: my GPS, which has guided me flawlessly through Paris and much of Germany, both on foot and driving; my scientific calculator, the only HP I have ever owned (the awesome HP-41C app); my mobile e-mail platform; my text messaging platform; my source of news; my in-flight entertainment, from music to comedy to movies; my connection to Google Drive, and Google apps, which beat Office by a lot; my ghost detector; my FaceTime instrument to make video calls to loved ones when we’re apart; my management tool for bank accounts and bill paying; my camera, both video and still; and probably a lot of other things.

    The thing I use it for the least – once a week – is a phone. But the amount of other equipment it replaces makes it so well worth the cost, I would never give it up.

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