Either you, and everyone you know, has never used snapchat, twitter, vine, facebook, yelp, maps, spotify, tumblr, tinder or the mobile web at all or you're posturing. As you live in a cosmopolitan European city and are under the age of 50, I vote posturing.
Okay. Apology accepted. Sorry for calling you out. Because you seem genuinely confused by what happened, I suggest you consider the empathy of the situation. Smartphones are all over the place. Plenty of people use them for all sorts of stuff. They're hardly a deviant possession. You, yourself, are conversing on an esoteric social network that leans toward technology. And while you do not possess nor desire a smartphone, odds are good that many people here do. You likely have a good sense that your position is the outlier. Yet you do not speak from an outlier footing - you enforce your viewpoint on everyone else: "This is a serious question: why would anyone want a smartphone? Never owned one, don't think I would seriously consider getting one instead of my phone." Your arguments are borderline fatuous - yes, your phone has a keyboard but if you want to text someone you're stuck in the T9 backwater of 2001. And while I'm sure your phone gets great reception, the possession of an operating system does not make reception worse. The fact of the matter is you have no need for LTE, no need for 4G, no need for anything other than the raw voice carrier so really, it's not that you're getting better reception than everyone else it's that your phone is so primitive that you can't use a decent signal. And you're not an idiot. It's not like you haven't thought about this before. It's not that you've succinctly determined that everyone else that possesses a smart phone is completely wrong about their wants and needs. But that's the way you present your argument. Know what wins arguments? Empathy. An understanding of your counterpart's position, argument and logic so that you can address their concerns on their terms. Any casual student of culture will recognize that people with smart phones use them too much, not too little so arguing that they're irrelevant only serves to alienate yourself from the person you're addressing. And we know we're not weird. Anybody walking into a store right now is about three times as likely to buy a smartphone as a conventional handpiece. So if you're going to argue that three out of four people own something they don't need, you should probably start by acknowledging the truth on the ground that you're the outlier, not them.
Might be a good idea then to not start the discussion with statements like these: I honestly have no idea what is the appeal. 'Not fitting your needs right now' is completely different from 'I don't see any appeal for any person'. Anyway, do you know the saying "don't knock it 'till you tried it"? How much time have you spent with smartphones? Genuine question. The thing about smartphones is that you can do so many things with it that it's extremely likely that a smartphone will enhance your life.This is a serious question: why would anyone want a smartphone? [...]
I've read your bio before. I was going to respond to your first paragraph more extensively, but saw that kleinbl00 already stole my thunder. Go read the book he recommends, I am also reading it and enjoying it. The main reason I wrote that it might not be a good idea to phrase it that way is that even though you stated your honesty pretty clearly, your tone and pros / cons didn't really made that believable. Try replacing 'smartphone' with 'laptop' in your post and it might become more clear; it's what _refugee_ was arguing. Kleinbl00, combining your response to ref with your original post, also noticed the discontinuity in your statements and thus thought you might be intentionally flippant. I think that was a reasonable statement to make. And yeah, most flimsy smartphones have dumb touchscreens that aren't perfect but it is a price well worth paying for the insane amount of use most people get out of it. Have you taken a look around the app stores, like beyond the well-known brand apps? There are so many niche apps, like for tracking sleep or predicting when your train arrives or giving you a Pomodoro timer or for tracking cryptocurrency or for having all the world's knowledge in your hands. Plus, go visit a Media Markt sometime - the phones there are actually not that different from what the rest of Europe has.