I've a Samsung Tocco Lite as my day-to-day phone, which I find a frustrating and hateful thing. It's not a smartphone, of course but it's touchscreen and has a handy option of a qwerty keyboard when you turn the phone around in your hand ... except it rarely seems to work when you most need it. Also when you have to make one of those calls where you are given a menu by a recorded voice (how I hate those anyway!) and you have to press a button, the backlight has always gone off, meaning the onscreen keyboard has vanished and I seem to be hopeless at getting it back again.
My back-up is my old Sony Ericsson T610 which must be about eleven years old. It may be feeble compared to modern stuff but it does what it's supposed to, still, apart from being lazy to scroll at times.
I quite like the idea of having a smartphone, whilst simultaneously hating the idea. I do like being offline when I'm out and about and find texting from the street bothersome. I think it would be handy for the following, though, especially 1 & 2.
1. Being able to bid on an eBay auction when I'm not at my laptop.
2. Checking the price of things online, when out and about in the high street, bargain-hunting.
3. Using maps very occasionally if I have difficulty finding an address I'm driving to. I don't do 'sat-nav' either.
4. Pointing it at the night sky and finding out what all the stars are would be nice, especially for my girlfriend, who tends to reach for the binoculars far more that I. Apparently there is an app that will enable this.
I'd only need this sort of thing occasionally so it's really hard to justify, especially when £10 thrown at my current contract-less phone will last a couple of months.
Regarding people with smartphones, they seem to be updating Facebook or Twitter accounts with comments about where they are and who they are with, or photographing meals sitting in front of them in a restaurant! I find this sort of activity unrewarding and fairly pointless/ banal and of course, you can do that sort of thing when you get home and that way the burglars don't know when it's good to pay your house a visit.
My daughter has an iPhone and every few minutes it makes a funny noise and she's checking it, no matter where we are, for some no doubt essential communication from her vast array of buddies. It's pointless saying anything because she doesn't remember a time when life was more enjoyable and free from this sort of purposeless and constant intrusion.