When my car's GPS took me miles down a road that was washed out on a trip hundreds of miles from my home, Google Navigation on my smartphone suggested a different route that got me safely to my destination.

It's a flexible and reliable alarm and kitchen timer.

I can read novels comfortably in bed on my smartphone (none of my several laptops are very ergonomic for this purpose).

I can map my bike rides and get stats on min/max/average speed, elevation, etc. (all the while using it as a music player).

It lets me easily maintain multiple shopping lists.

I can tune my guitar with it.

It functions as a real flashlight (my phone has a very bright LED).

My smartphone is no replacement for a computer, but it's better at these tasks than any computer I own.

If I keep going at this rate, I think I will quit smartphones within a few years.

I own a Kindle for books, which helped a lot with my Internet addiction and the lack of focus, and for communication I have a dumb mobile phone with a battery that lasts for weeks.

Realistically speaking the only reason I'd buy a smartphone these days is for photos. Anything else is just fucking useless. I can't do work on a smartphone, and I don't even want to. I enjoy having time off of any electronic device because it helps my brain unwind and adds quality to my life.

This is where I disagree. I love my smartphone (Galaxy S2!) because it lets me read my Google Reader and Kindle on the go. But if you don't like the experience of reading on the screen, I can see how its perceived usefulness will diminish.

Smartphone utility is probably also strongly correlated with time spent away from a laptop. I rarely use my smartphone at work or at home, but I tend to spend most of my time out and about on the weekends, so access to email, IM and Maps while out of the house is worth the price of admission. You are never out of touch, you can find the address/directions to anything, from anywhere, anytime.

Then add on camera, Facebook, Yelp for finding restaurants, Yahoo Fantasy Football app, Evernote for keeping workout logs and saving commonly run queries and I'm pretty much in love. But as always, YMMV.

I would never replace my computer with a smartphone, but that hardly seems to be a valid argument for why one shouldn't "like them".

I don't get why this has so many points right now.

Do people really consider smartphones "more impressive" / impactful than the World Wide Web?

I have, more times than I can remember, looked up restaurant recommendations, reached consensus with other people wirelessly, and then made a reservation, all without leaving my smartphone, while standing on the sidewalk somewhere.

I have also walked up to a restaurant only to find it closed, and found a delicious alternative within seconds thanks to Yelp, Urbanspoon, et al.

I have taken pictures, uploaded them to [social network] and received responses within minutes, if not seconds. I have met up with friends because the GPS told us we were near each other.

My smartphone is great for consuming the day's news (especially on a high-ppi screen, reading is a joy) while on the train to work. Laptop or even tablet? Don't be ridiculous, I need one hand hanging onto a railing.

My smartphone is also my light meter, when I'm out and about playing with vintage cameras that pre-date my birth. Not a very typical use case, but one where a laptop or even a tablet would be utterly useless.

I love my smartphone.

You're making the outrageous claim, the benefits of smartphones are widely known and well documented. There is a reason multiple billion (billion with a b) people are buying them and keep replacing them every 1-3 years, at quite hefty prices. You should be the one having to make a non-terse statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard

On most forums your comment would be classified as a trolling attempt.

In case you're not trolling, off the top of my head, what's made possible by mobile internet access, as offered by smartphones:

* easily accessible shared calendars, everywhere you go, including getting reminders/notifications (instead of having an actual physical agenda + having to set actual reminders on a dumb phone)

* GPS navigation everywhere in the world, for free (instead of having to get a separate GPS device)

* instant translation services anywhere in the world, for free (this is a life saver in many situations); this can't be realistically be made available on any other kind of comparable smart device, except for ones you'd probably object, too (smartwatches, smart glasses, smart rings, whatever; laptops and tablets are too bulky and impractical, they don't count)

* apps for various specialized uses (for example to track time schedules for public transport, check availability for public bike services, etc.)

* easy note taking on the go, with instant backup and sharing with a group of people (you'd need the agenda previously mentioned but that wouldn't have backups or sharing)

* things which replace a bunch of physical stuff you'd have to carry around: credit cars, car keys, discount cards, paper airline tickets, agenda/notebook, GPS device, games device, etc.

Anyway, I've worked far more than your terse snarky comment ever deserved.

My POV and i guess the author's is from people who do not really use smartphones much (personally i never use any app, i only use twitter and other social sites from the desktop via the web browser and that sporadically, i never allow any site or app to push notifications and my only use for my smartphone outside being a phone to make and receive calls is to read websites and ebooks).

But i suspect if you consider smartphones an essential part of your life (i don't, i only carry it with me just in case something happens since i am in a foreign country, but at my home i could regularly forget it at my place - even forget to recharge it for days) then you can see other negative aspects past those mentioned in the article.

So essentially, it isn't really that "smartphones are shitty computers with too many limitations" vs "smartphones are sucking, dopamine delivery systems" but "smartphones are shitty computers with too many limitations and sucking, dopamine delivery systems". It is only your POV that changes which one you see as worse.

I've never experienced the massively life changing effects of having a smartphone, and (thankfully) none of my friends seem to be those people who are always looking at their phones.

I see about no productive work happening on smartphones. It's a leisure device at best, or something convenient, but not something that will ever replace a PC with a proper OS and full keyboard.

Sure, there will always be the 1% of folks who does something else with their smartphone, but that's a very, very small minority.

For an example from my own experience, I used to do a lot of contract IT work, both freelance and as part of a firm, often visiting several clients over the course of a day. Originally I'd keep track of everything in an old-fashioned spiral-bound pocket notebook, but dead trees are hard to grep, especially remotely, and at the rate at which I filled notebooks it got to be a real pain having to copy and distill everything worth keeping track of from the old one to the new one. I had an old-fashioned candybar phone, too, which worked well enough for phone calls and text messages, and if I had to, I could use it to talk a client through power-cycling a server and other similarly simple procedures, which was at least a little better than having to go out and do it myself, or back to the office where I could remote into the client's PDU.

So I bought an iPhone. Thus, with a modicum of effort, I gained a shared, always up-to-date calendar, providing both an agenda of upcoming events and a searchable record of what I'd done and when; an always-connected email client, providing both an easy means of keeping in touch while on the road and, again, a searchable record of past communications; a shared, collated, searchable collection of notes concerning every relevant detail of my various clients' operations; a shared, &c., collection of contact information for all my various clients and industry contacts; and, last but not least, an always-connected administrative terminal with which to remotely solve even relatively subtle and complex problems, as and when necessary, for clients who had urgent needs and for whom I could not fit an in-person emergency visit into my schedule.

No doubt all of this makes it sound as though I was a preposterously busy person, and for several years that's exactly what I was. My smartphone enabled me to streamline my efforts in a fashion which I had hardly imagined possible before I first laid hands on the means of so doing, to the extent that it made me able to get more work done, with less effort, than I had been able to accomplish before. If there is any purpose at all behind our species' longstanding habit of building interesting trinkets and gewgaws, "more work with less effort" is certainly the very soul of that purpose.

I do, though, like your "only frivolous people with frivolous purposes would ever have a smartphone" argument, though. I think that's the most sensible thing anyone has said in this whole thread. Certainly it is in no way redolent of, for example, someone who bravely defies his ignorance in order to declaim at length on a subject of which he has absolutely no relevant experience whatsoever.