My experience is quite similar; never bought a smartphone and use just a Nokia phone with voice/SMS only. It’s not exactly like not having a phone at all, but in a typical day I don’t receive more than one message/call, and more often than not the phone remains completely silent for the whole day. I’ve watched friends managing their WhatsApp chats (and similar time-sucking services) and I’m still very much scared by the perspective of constantly being pinged for random reasons. With my old-fashioned phone I have to pay some cents for every message sent. I could change my tariff plan at any time, but so far I’ve choose to stick with the old tariff, because it’s a very strong incentive to send only messages that actually matter.
That said, I usually spend several hours a day working at my laptop and don’t travel very often. Even with a smartphone at hand, I would still prefer to work from my laptop if available (much bigger screen, no weight in my hand etc). Also, my colleagues are accustomed to emails and my parents are sort of smartphone-skepticals themselves; putting all toghether, my social pressure for getting into smartphones is pretty low. But it’s definitely possible to live without and I encourage to give it a try.
My experience is quite similar; never bought a smartphone and use just a Nokia phone with voice/SMS only. It’s not exactly like not having a phone at all, but in a typical day I don’t receive more than one message/call, and more often than not the phone remains completely silent for the whole day. I’ve watched friends managing their WhatsApp chats (and similar time-sucking services) and I’m still very much scared by the perspective of constantly being pinged for random reasons. With my old-fashioned phone I have to pay some cents for every message sent. I could change my tariff plan at any time, but so far I’ve choose to stick with the old tariff, because it’s a very strong incentive to send only messages that actually matter.
That said, I usually spend several hours a day working at my laptop and don’t travel very often. Even with a smartphone at hand, I would still prefer to work from my laptop if available (much bigger screen, no weight in my hand etc). Also, my colleagues are accustomed to emails and my parents are sort of smartphone-skepticals themselves; putting all toghether, my social pressure for getting into smartphones is pretty low. But it’s definitely possible to live without and I encourage to give it a try.