As a student from another city, I have only enough 
  understanding of the geography to read Google Maps 
  critically - for the details, it's indispensable.

Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7 years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google Maps.

People used to have maps, or just go out and explore new places. Not only learn the streets, but find great restaurants, coffee shops, stores, meet new and interesting people.

I am amazed daily at how these things have instilled learned helplessness into people in such a short time span.

I'll be off your lawn in a moment, but first, you might want to consider that just because something can be done the old way doesn't mean that that's superior, that smartphones are in fact very good at showing you new places to go, and that "wanting machines to do tasks that machines are better at than humans" and "helplessness" are not synonymous.

Navigation is a perishable skill. Overreliance on GPS has been shown to degrade navigation skills and other brain functions [1].

1. http://phys.org/news/2010-11-reliance-gps-hippocampus-functi...

So? Using a calculator probably degrades your ability to do sums in your head, yet a calculator allows many people to do sums they wouldn't be able to do just in their heads.

And literacy degrades people's ability to memorize texts.

It does, and something is lost.

Storytelling is/was a great human tradition, perhaps the defining one in a literal sense. It's becoming extinct because of literacy. Today it's considered an eccentric pursuit.

That doesn't mean literacy is bad or that campfire stories repeated and evolved for generations are better than novels or films. But, oral storytelling as art or culture has characteristics that just aren't present in novels just like novels have characteristics that aren't present in TV shows.

If you are willing to be more abstract about it, you might compare it to working as an Apple engineer and collecting edible roots near a stream. The former is clearly superior as a way of feeding your family. The latter still has certain human qualities that are beneficial to people and worth preserving.

As we move forward we lose some things which may be valuable. Nostalgia and the desire to preserve is not a bad thing.

I recently realized that I like plays. Movies have mostly replaced them, which is a shame.

However, there are things that movies can do that plays definitely can't do, and the reverse is true as well.

I think that there's room for both!

I'm in my 40s - so I've spent most of my life using "normal" maps.

For me - they suck. I have a lousy sense of direction. Despite actively trying to improve it for decades I regularly got lost. Not lost in the fun-exploring-new-places sort of way - but lost in the fuck-me-going-to-miss-the-last-train-home sort of way. I used to regularly schedule in hours of extra time for "just in case" scenarios. I used to avoid unfamiliar locations and over-plan trips to extreme degrees. I never wandered off the beaten track in the middle of the day - coz I could easily spend hours finding my way back.

I now go to strange places with almost zero planning. I can just pick a random direction for a walk and be confident that I can come back again. They have saved me probably weeks of prep time and contingency time at this point, and have let me go to many places that I would have otherwise never have visited. They have lifted a huge weight of worry from my shoulders every time I had to get from A to B.

So for me google maps et al have freed me from the learned helplessness of traditional maps.

Without smartphones does not mean using paper maps. It means that featurephones would have eventually converged with offline GPS devices -- the Garmins and TomToms of the world.

In many ways, this would have been a better model for the navigating consumer. GPS devices operated on a one-time purchase model -- no subscription, no contracts, no data caps. Maps were shipped with the device, and many came with free lifetime updates. Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.

There are also broader implications. Without smartphones, AT&T and Verizon would have lost a lucrative revenue stream. Their best choice for deploying capital would have been to build fiber to the home. Not a bad trade -- smartphones for gigabit broadband in every house.

With wireless at a technological plateau, maybe T-Mobile and Sprint could have caught up. Perhaps we'd have seen more robust competition to the duopoly, and lower prices.

This is alternate history. But it's alternate history along the lines of Douglas North, who dared to question the economic benefits of railroads.

That would completely kill public transit navigation, however, which relies on live access to current public transit schedules and tracking data.

As I stated:

> Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.

It's a natural broadcasting application. You really don't need point-to-point. Eventually when DTV came along, it might've been datacast over ATSC.

A lot of technology is path-dependent. We got smartphones, so everything went one way. Without smartphones, the very same clever people would've been working on other solutions.

It would have been different -- worse in some ways, better in others.

Yep, they would have added more and more features to these increasingly powerful, increasingly generalized electronic devices that fit in your pocket until... Oops, look at that, smartphones all over again.

Today's featurephones have GPS, navigation, mail, IM, sometimes even installable apps. In 2006, we would have considered them smartphones.

If you read my original post, you will notice that I focus on the mobile broadband connection as the distinguishing feature of a smartphone. It is this feature that kept people locked into cellular contracts, raised the barriers to entry in the wireless world, ended Verizon's FiOS deployment, and ushered in the always-connected smartphone world that we live in today.

Technological realities are often more path-dependent than we like to pretend. Pay TV could be dominated by wired cable television (US), or broadcast satellite (Europe and Asia). We could've ended up in a Minitel world or an Internet world. A lot depends on business decisions and other non-tech dynamics.

In our case, it was the iPhone/AT&T combination that determined our path. That is why I used the definition that AT&T uses in exploring what it meant to live in a world without "smartphones." AT&T refuses to activate smartphones on its postpaid network without a data plan. Any phone that doesn't require a data plan is considered a featurephone.

I'm afraid not, no. In 2006, a smartphone was something like a Palm Treo or an HTC TyTN. In fact, that's what a smartphone has been for over a decade. Even the price points have remained similar.

The iPhone was an important milestone in smartphone development, most critically with regard to usability, but it was initially a step backwards in many ways compared to smartphones that had already been on the market for years, and lacked even 3G that had been available in other smartphones for some time.

    > Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7
    > years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google
    > Maps

And by extension, people just 100 years ago survived (sometimes) without antibiotics. Or ATMs. Or television. Or commercial flight. Isn't amazing how helpless people have become?

Also, they didn't survive at all, they're all dead.

>People used to have maps

At one point, earlier, people didn't even have paper maps, so why stop there?

You're conflating helplessness with convenience. Yes, people used to do things the hard way. Now we get to do them the easy way.

Argue the convenience is not worth the privacy costs, but don't suggest the convenience is trifling. Sure, these tasks were all possible, but it's clear that a smart phone can replace your map, bus schedule, train schedule, subway map, Zagat guide—in many cases not only is it a substitute but a patent improvement.

The hypocrisy of posting this on a website eludes you, doesn't it? People used to communicate face-to-face, why are you here?

> Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7 years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google Maps.

Actually 10 years ago I got lost all the time, would ask my way to people with very vague memory and not much of a talent to give direction, in the worst cases I would pay a taxi after a while to bring me back to a known point, and got taxed huge amounts when the taxi guy would also get lost because the address wasn't correct.

Some people (i.e me) are really bad at orienting and reading maps. Before Google Maps I had a "dumbphone" with a GPS app, and it changed my life (even when going new places I could go back in a predictable amount of time. Imagine the impact).

Are you saying people did just as well when the only option was paper-based maps?

As someone who spent the majority of their life with only that option available, I very strongly doubt that.

Good point.

I'm guessing students were less bold with CTA and took more cabs, or else avoided going out unless they knew the could afford a lengthy adventure getting home.

It wasn't impossible before, but it's certainly easier.

One feature I noticed in moving from a developing country (Pakistan) to a developed one (Canada) was how horrible city structures were in Canada. In Lahore (8+ million people) it's easy to tell someone visiting the city for the first time how to get from point A to B. No one uses smartphones for maps, because they don't need to. Buses are usually so frequent you don't need to wait more than 10 min.

In Canada, I see everyone using Maps to navigate because the cities are structured so bad it's hard for even the natives to navigate.

I can totally relate to this! I noticed this exact same phenomenon when I visited Seattle from Bangalore, India. Even today whenever I have to visit a new place I make sure to get the general direction right and then just ask people.

I wouldn't put it down to bad city planning though. From my limited experience of visiting Seattle (about 3 weeks) I sensed that it's got more to do with people don't want to be bothered and left alone. Where as in India if I ask one person for direction I get at least half a dozen people telling me how to get there, which bus to take and what not!

Well I had the exact opposite experience. I am from France and I made a two month internship in Bangalore. If there is one thing we agree with my collegues who went there is that it was awful to find your way. Even cabs/auto-rickshaws have great difficulties to bring from a point A to a point B if you do not know yourself the exact path. The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city. The indications in the street were hard to find and see. I suppose it might be because of what we are used to from where where we are from.

> Even cabs/auto-rickshaws have great difficulties to bring from a point A to a point B if you do not know yourself the exact path.

Cabs and auto-rickshaws in Bangalore are notorious for swindling huge sums of money by pretending that they know nothing about the city where in reality they know every nook and corner. They do this so that they can take you all over the place and on top of that bill you exorbitant amounts. And if you are a westerner then just don't go anywhere near them unless you know the exact route to take!

>The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city.

This is definitely not the case as the public transport cover just about every part of the city, even where autos hesitate to take. It's just that you need at least a month to figure out the routes, buses, transits etc., which gives the perception of non-existent public transport. I lived in Bangalore for 7 years before I started using public transport and despite being a local, Kannada being my mother tongue, it took me about a month to get it right.

From my personal limited experience of visiting various metros in India I'm fairly confident that Bangalore has the largest public bus transportation in India.

>The indications in the street were hard to find and see.

That's probably because there aren't any :). There are very few on arterial roads but even they aren't reliable as the one-way traffic rules change very so often!

That is actually true. Not every cab driver knows in minute detail every place in the city, or might know them by different names. All I said was that if someone gives you verbal directions to someplace it's easy to get there because the city structure is simple.

I'm not sure I'd put this down to "horrible city structures".

Frequency of public transport is typically proportional to the population density. People are more likely to want to know the time of the next bus/train/tram when the cost of missing it is a 20 minute wait.

Managing population density is definitely part of city planning and I'd suggest limiting it has a more beneficial impact on quality of life than more frequenct public transport.

I live in one of the most denstly populated areas on earth and for me at least, the benefit of having a train interval of < 2 minutes does not offset the downside of having no space. E.g.:

- Peak train density >6 people per sq meter (1.8 sq ft per person)

- Peak urban density ~130,000 people per sq km (333,000 per sq mile)

That's quite a generalization you're making. Most of Montreal is served by 10 minut buses - that is, most time between two buses is 10 minutes. And there are buses 24/7 on big streets. And there's the metro. And there's the train if you want to go on either shore.

I never spoke about the transit system in Canada. I am Calgary at the moment, and even though there is definite room for improvement, it's fairly reasonable. (avg bus time here is >20min though)

Lahore has four levels of transit system available. There is a cross-city Metro bus system (which has a dedicated overhead road for itself so effectively a train). There are big buses which run long routes. There are shorter vans which run shorter routes. There are 'route'-rickshaws which even run even shorter routes. And if you are rich, there is a fifth option of getting a taxi-rickshaw at 10x price.

All this makes the system extremely robust (if bus is late you can eg. take a two van combo), and because all 4 systems compete with each other the transit system is time efficient and cheap.

Lahore is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, almost five times denser than Calgary.

I don't know if you'll ever see this, but... what is the price for one of the taxi-rickshaws? I'm really curious about costs around the world.

1 USD ~ 100 PKR. Minimum wage is 10k PKR and typical college educated people earn 20k on their first job.

So minimum bus/van/route-rickshaw fare is 15 PKR. Might have gone up to 20 PKR since I was home. Max goes up to about 50-60 PKR. (you pay for how far you want to go).

taxi-rickshaws can cost anywhere from 30 PRK (1 km) to 600 PKR cross city (20-30). Depends on from where to where you are going, time of the day, and your ability to haggle.

Wow, I honestly would have never thought that cities would have better (easier to navigate) layouts in countries like Pakistan. I am very interested in learning some details on what exactly you mean by this. :)

So I was specifically talking about moving from place to place without the need for maps. I am only comparing with Calgary and the greater Toronto area (not Toronto city). I am sure other cities in NA are different.

One reason is that Lahore is divided into gated housing authorities (which is bad for a lot of other reasons) but to get to your destination you just need directions to the the gated community. One inside, everything is neatly divided into grid structured blocks and numbered streets which are easy to navigate.

Calgary's streets have names not numbers. (Erin Grove, SE) tells me almost nothing about where the street is located. Even if I were a native I would need a map for unfamiliar streets.

Also, because people in Lahore are generally poor (most people don't have cars) and not very literate, the city grows in a way that they can navigate. Nothing to be proud of, but that is probably the reason I would say Lahore is 'better' designed.

Chicago is easy. It's laid out on a grid with a very few diagonal arteries. Texting CTABUS XXXX to 41411(where XXXX is the stop number) tells you when the next bus is coming.

There's only a couple of trains, and they shouldn't be very hard to get a handle on.

All of this is easy for me to say (having been born in Chicago), but there's really not a lot to memorize. It's no New York.

Edit: Here's a tip; memorize the major East-West boulevards on the North side (their order, if not their number.) The city is Cartesian, and that helps a lot with the conversion.

Yeah, but I don't have bus stop locations memorized (except around campus), and the most efficient route depends on exactly when you're traveling. Having Google figure this out for me is really convenient.

As soon as I realised that Maps were the only feature of a smartphone that I valued positively, I went back to carrying a dumbphone and a map.

Battery life trumps navigation, for me, comfortably. If I'm lost after a long day, I need the option to phone my destination.

Regarding battery life, I'd be curious to know how a modern smart phone would fare if you used it as infrequently as a dumbphone. When truly idle my nexus 5 seems to drain very little; it's the fact that it's so useful (and in turn so frequently used) that seems to be the issue here.

I understand why you say this, but I think this is not exactly the issue. I do carry an internet-capable device, whenever I might need one (i.e. less often than you would think).

If I were to carry a smartphone for this purpose then I would get a worse experience than I do on a larger screen, and it would hinder my ability to use telephony services when I need them.

For my needs, those services do not belong in one device.

For what it's worth, if battery life is important, my Note 3--about as far as you can get from a dumbphone--has amazing battery life. The battery meter barely goes down after an entire day. I occasionally don't charge it for two days and it's still green and going strong. It's literally never died on me. And I don't do anything particularly to keep the battery life up, like reducing screen brightness.

Good battery life, but online testing suggests that it will die before day's end if you use it for internet browsing.

For comparison, I occasionally don't charge my phone for two weeks.

Edit: apologies for editing :)

> Good, but other tests say it dies after 9 hours of browsing.

I wouldn't really know, because never have I been in a situation where I actually used my phone nonstop for 9 hours. =]

For my typical usage, the battery will last several days at least and probably a bit more if I put more effort into reducing battery consumption. I actually don't know how long it'll last since it's never died. Definitely not two weeks, but long enough for me to not really worry about the battery life.

All that said, I can definitely see the appeal of a phone that lasts two weeks. I think the Note 3 sits at a decent compromise between that and my old phone, a Galaxy S3, which could barely last 8 hours (of typical, very intermittent usage).

Still basically nothing when compared with dumbphones which can last weeks.

I bet it still doesn't beat my Nokia C139 :P

I'd say it's all about learning how to avoid misusing a powerful tool. I bet when we discovered fire we initially burned down a few forests by accident before we discovered, say, safety matches. Or when we discovered the wheel as a method of transportation we probably careened of a cliff here and there before we developed brakes and crumple zones.

I've heard a number of my friends complain about facebook, initially, and later about smartphones. While I understand that the 'pull' of checking what's going on in your social network, or checking out the latest funny picture posted on reddit, I think the solution is not (necessarily( to get off facebook or get a dumbphone, but rather to learn how to responsibly use a potentially highly addictive tool.

Perhaps this is a problem that only plagues these kinds of transitional periods. I've noticed, for example, that my younger sister (~15) is absolutely addicted to her phone and whatsapp, and my parents, who are generally quite responsible and firm in how they raised us, don't even really seem to notice the problem. And perhaps that's because it's so new, like television was once.

Smartphones are devices made for content consumption with a phone added on top.

Not consuming content would be misusing it. Like buying an expensive TV to watch the news once a day. Why waste money on things you won't utilize most of the time?

First off, I think you're misinterpreting what I mean with 'misuse'. I meant it in the context of 'health', and I don't really care what the intended purpose was. The television, for example, is a great invention and I love watching shows and movies in the comfort of my home. You could say the 'use' of a tv is that you watch as much as possible so advertisers can make money. I think we can still agree that watching tv all day is 'misuse' when it comes to your mental or physical health.

Second, 'content consumption' is a bit vague. I'd say a smartphone is worth having because so many people use whatsapp instead of sms, because it has google maps, because I can check my trello board occasionally, because I can check the weather, and very frequently to find out how to get from A to B using public transport. None of that requires me to be constantly 'consuming', but it's still very useful.

In fact, For a full two years I had a smartphone (Nexus) with no data plan, and it was still worth having. It functioned as my calendar, notepad, dictation device, and even maps (although it is less useful offline).

There really are many other apps that are useful besides just Google Maps though. It's great to have a phone that can play music for the gym, have an app like venmo for small transactions when you forget cash, or a portable e-reader for the bus or train, or uber for just-in-case situations... and many more. All of these aren't indispensable, but they just make life so much easier and better.

I definitely agree with you that removing social network apps is a great way to improve productivity a bit. And of course, if you don't need the apps listed above, then, yes, there isn't much point in paying extra for a smartphone. But please realize that many people are willing to pay for the significant convenience that a smartphone affords them.

Not using a smartphone just because of the battery life or durability though is silly. A specialized case will nearly solve both problems. There are privacy concerns and productivity concerns and price concerns, sure. But this is the future - and we should be trying to address those concerns and change them for the better, not fight smartphones altogether.

Navigation is pretty handy, but the thing I really love about a smartphone is having a decent portable camera always with me. To quickly take a snap to share with family (mms, email or social media), when you otherwise would have missed that is pretty cool.

Depends on the dumbphone.

With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."

My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.

>With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."

With a generic "smartphone" you do, with an iPhone you just swipe up from the bottom right corner. It's nicely sandboxed outside the lock screen - you can see the photos you just took, but to review other photos you need to enter your PIN.

Newer Android phones (4.0 upwards I believe) also allow quick camera access from the lockscreen.

> My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.

Sony smartphones work the same way

'Opportunistic technology' has applications in the classroom.

I have an old OS Blackberry Bold and I use the camera in class to photo student work and email it to a webmail account in-lesson then pop it on projector. I also use music player with 3.5mm lead to play podcasts &c. Fairly quick to use. Students encouraged to photo screens/whiteboards and email them in &c.

As a more mature (cough) person, I make limited personal use of social media and tend not to have very high traffic. The 'smartish' aspect is all data collection.

I have a nokia 301 that I bought for the smaller form factor, good battery life and some international use, and found that I used it a lot more for many of the reasons listed in the article. If I need to, I can still check my email/the weather/bus times, but every now and then I find myself switching back to my smartphone for the same reasons you list.

Not having maps is extremely limiting. Sure, if I'm going a few places I can check google maps beforehand, plan out a route, and get to my destination. The flexibility to deviate from that is completely lost, and why I have to alternate between the two phones.

>Google Maps knows when the bus is coming, and which buses to take to get somewhere quickly.

I recently visited SF and mostly used public transportation to get around. Google Maps was awesome.

I went back to a dumbphone and those rare times I need a map (unfamiliar city) I either write down directions before I leave or just flip open the laptop.

Funny last night found my Walmart "dumbphone" (rebranded blackberry?) has a Java version of Google Maps that's actually useful.

Even when I know a city well, having realtime traffic info from Google Maps is really useful.

Do you not have electronic bus stop signs in chicago?