Facebook is a pretty good IM device as most people have an account, plus it's easy to disable the streaming feed. Twitter is good for quick news, things that can be summed up in 140 characters. I follow mostly gaming devs and breaking news feeds from BBC and NASA. My smart phone feels like another limb, and I really can't imagine not having it. I'd need a backpack to carry all the services it offers, even if offline.
Yours is a very portable lifestyle, and I can appreciate the economy of space. I agree, I've slowly needed fewer and fewer devices as the ones I have can do more and more. I like redundancy. Redundancy helps systems survive shock. I have a few different ways of doing things, in case one method fails. This can be due to power outages, poor quality construction of the item, theft, or damage. I call people on my actual phone, which always has great sound quality, even in bad weather. I text message if I'm in transit. In my car, I listen to the news on CBC. I meet friends and visit with them. When we visit, we discuss the current events, philosophy, books we've recently read or refused to read, what to do about Ty the beagle's 'houndini' escape antics and other soul-stirring tidbits. At home, I have an enormous-screen desktop computer with an old-timey mouse and keyboard with the number pad, on a big ol' desk, with a comfy chair and a footstool, and a place to put my coffee mug. Different worlds!
I dislike that middle bit of your last paragraph. I also have friends that I talk to, don't know why having a smartphone hints at my lack of friends. Other than that, yeah we just have different ways of life. I embrace new tech as I see how it can help me and how I can incorporate it into my life. Also all my information is backed up on at least two different hard drives (I quickly found out in highschool that the amount of copies you have of something is # of hard drives - 1). If something happened to my phone, laptop, or desktop I'd just get another and load everything back on. I've never dealt with a power outage that lasted more than 8 hours, the life of my phone.
Sounds like you appreciate redundancy too, with 2 different hard drives! Me telling you what happens in my life is not a statement about nor a judgment of yours. I like how we are both adopters of technology in different ways. A smartphone certainly is an always-on, always-connected (with friends and information) economical use of space in your life, and as you say, the data is replaceable in the case of damage or loss. Do you live in the city? One day I may be more mobile; for now, I am rural, so the internet is not wireless hotspots, it's cable or landlines. Is that part of reasons for the difference?
Oh okay that makes sense. I read it as a demining "kids these days never talk to one another" instead of you talking about how you communicate. My bad. That's probably it, I didn't even think about that. Such a foreign concept to me to not be able to access the net at all time, it's been that way for me all my life.