Andy Ihnatko on smartphones

Andy Ihnatko makes me feel old. While I like my devices to do what they say on the box, i.e. my smartphone is a smart phone, he goes and writes something that makes so much sense, but I still haven’t come entirely round to his way of thinking*:

So really, the point of the phone is just to keep me connected to the services and features I’m actually interested in.

Note that he doesn’t mean actually making and receiving calls. He’s talking about staying in the loop, no matter where you are — with Bloglines, Technorati, Google and Yahoo! by tuning into their mobile offerings.

Lives are so incredibly fast-paced in the modern world, and it is completely logical for our mobile devices to help keep our need for information under control. If one device, the smartphone, can manage these demands — via platform-independent applications and the Internet — AND handle actual telephony well, the convergence of analogue (by that I mean voice) and digital two-way communication makes perfect rational sense.

What do you use your smartphone for? Do you use all the Web-connected applications he lists in his article to stay connected, or are you more ‘old-fashioned’ and see your smartphone as a phone first and mobile digital communications device second?

* Frankly, I think it’s more the high data charges that have almost completely stalled my adoption of the services he speaks of.