Future setting speculation: will smartphones really stand the test of time?, Should settings assume that in the future everyone will have them? Options

[Wounded Ronin]

So, I stopped using my smartphone back in 2012 and I haven't looked back.

Unless you get an even more expensive ruggedized smartphone, they are expensive and fragile. Even if you do get an expensive ruggedized smartphone it will eventually become useless when they upgrade the OS on you and the hardware can't handle it anymore.

Unless you spend a lot of time thinking about how to safeguard it, they are essentially a big threat to your privacy and online account security.

Unless you keep an alternative emergency communications device, if you ever do serious wilderness activities like primitive camping, you'll find that you end up taking your fragile expensive smartphone into the wilderness with you since you realize that not having any ability to attempt to place emergency cell calls is probably foolhardy.

All that being said, the only thing you are getting from the smartphone in exchange for all this headache is an extremely mediocre computer.

I would rather carry a cheap and replaceable non-data-capable cell phone (since having a mobile phone is regrettably expected of everyone nowadays) and replace it when and if it gets destroyed. In the long run putting up with the hassle and cost of a smartphone seems like madness.


The thing is, I was struck how in Shadowrun these days, even Shadowrun Returns, now has the assumption that everyone is running around with a smartphone. (That's pretty much what a commlink is, right?)

I haven't read much recently written science fiction or fantasy stories set in the future, but my sense is that these days everyone is portrayed as having something similar to a smartphone.

But, I don't know...do you really think that people will be running around with smartphones in 10 years? Instead of realizing how ridiculous they are, ditching them, and simply using a real computer when they need to get work done?

Will the future inevitably tend towards greater conspicuous consumption and frivolous consumerism? Short of a global plunge into poverty and shortage, I guess.

I'm really starting to value Frank Herbert's idea of a major rebellion that involves smashing technology as a big future historical event.