> Smartphones are devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour, and it is a statistic that is surely going up.

I might be the odd one out here, but I'll often go days without so much as touching my phone. Either I have my laptop with me, which is better than my iPhone at everything save being a phone, or if I'm just looking to burn time I'll read my Kindle. I have friends who are constantly glued to their phones, and I simply don't understand the attraction.

"devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour"

So, they're like phones, then. ;) When I was a teen, my peers and I used our phones (some of them even were landlines) constantly. But the fashion attribute was minimal, and the functionality was pretty much identical regardless of brand.

Not that that kept me from feeling immeasurably cooler than everyone else when I got a nice and tiny Nokia 8290...

Also, it's usually two years until you can get a new one in the US, what with the way contracts work.

>Calling the things we carry in our pockets today "phones" is nothing more than an artifact of history. (In fact, my iPhone is a terrible phone.)

Really? In what other way except "battery life"?

Sound reviews found it had excellent sound, and same goes for reception. And the reliability of the phone network, even for simple calls, if far better than what it was back in the day.

And the contact list, search function, visual voicemail and ease of use for those functions is far better than most, if not all, pre-iPhone phones.

I live in emerald hills and I'd say about 80-90% (no exaggeration) of calls drop within the first 60 seconds. (Not an iPhone thing, a AT&T thing, of course.)