People deciding to ditch their smartphones

I've intentionally never owned a smartphone.

I used a Nokia 3310 for 12 years, starting in high school. When it finally broke (and I was a 30-ish young dad), there were always several "old phones" abandoned by family members or close relatives, so I've been using those to their end ever since. The current one is a Nokia 2600, which I genuinely dislike (tiny buttons, overengineered menu system), but the miserable thing stubbornly works, so what can I do?

IIRC, the idea of constantly reading e-mail or browsing the web from some tiny phone screen made me really uneasy even as a young adult. I surely liked computers, but that, I felt, would be too much. Would I really need anything else except SMS and direct calls from a phone, I thought? Probably not.

I loved talking to telecom salespeople when I had that 3310. "We have this new offer, so many megabytes of Internet, and... what's your current phone, by the way?" they would ask.

"A 3310," I replied.

"...Well, that's surely a classic, sir!" they would reply after a few seconds of silence.

I successfully worked as a journalist for years, whilst living in the dumb phone world. I don't remember having any problems. Neither have I ever gotten hopelessly lost on car trips with only a paper map, or hand-written directions, etc. During the last 3-4 years, though, I do sometimes feel like getting in the way of others, or of life: more and more relevant services seem to assume that the user has a smartphone. But I guess that's life.

I do like the idea of something as barebones as the Hellaphone, Inferno OS on Android phones [1, 2]. But the feature and UI bloat of current casual smartphones still makes me uneasy about getting one (I'll do it if I really have to, though). I occasionally also think about going landline- or even email-only, thus ditching mobile phones and constant availability altogether, but this would probably cause too much mess for our family.

But, re: young urban professionals ditching their smartphones after years of usage: dude, I knew in 2004 that this day will come.

1: http://jfloren.net/b/2015/8/18/2

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_-jQc53jw

Which surprised me because I found that my favorite band is playing in Chicago this May, and I was able to purchase physical tickets from Ticketmaster easily, whereas the Trans Siberian Orchestra performance in my city required the AXS app to get tickets.

There is no reasonable way for me to ditch my smart phone at this point.

That being said, a well paced strip of black electrical tape on the front facing camera on my older (and coincidentally less expensive model) smart phone will work until the economy corrects itself and works out the useless crap spyware storm it created.

I also still have my headphone jack and SD card too just FTR.