I'm sorry but, no.
Some people may be affected by phones adversely but some people will always be affected by something adversely.
There's nothing "addictive" about a phone, it's a limited-scope computing and media consumption device. Social media may be, in same ways, addictive but that, again, goes back to the age-old school "he's the captain of the football team, wow!" idiocy we've had for years.
"Screen damage" is another thing entirely -- that's not just smart phones it's the need to stare into lights all day, every day for our entire working lives and that we also choose to do it when we're not working. There will be millions of otherwise healthy adults in the next few decades with poor eyesight, poor hearing and very bad postures (and the issues surrounding that) because of the way we spend out time nowadays.

Or, your theory might be right...

Whatever.

As for the phone, it has roughly three visible components.

• Hardware - not addictive
• Visible Operating System (not baseband) - not addictive
• Applications and services - highly addictive, for many

Again, new design trends are about keeping people interacting with the services rather than getting a task done efficiently. That is so that the behaviors they emit can be measured, analyzed, and used. That use is sometimes sales for advertising and sometimes it is sale for opinion manipulation.

It's far from uncommon to see some adults and most teens jonesing for their phones after a few minutes. At social and cultural functions, the latter pretend they are discretely interacting with it but fool no one except themeselves while they dork around with it.

By the same logic, smart TVs, smart fridges, smart toilets, or a sat nav, etc are "PCs"...

To qualify as a "PC", the device probably needs to be able to perform the functions of a "classic" PC running an OS such as Linux, 'BSD or Windows. I'm not sure that smartphones fit this category, in the same way that playstation, xbox, etc is not considered a PC.

The typical smartphone has an embedded OS (which as standard the consumer has no access to), it has applications which are installed from a "store" and it is generally used for phone calls, sms and web/cloud access/services. It does not have a physical keyboard or mouse for example, nor much in the way of physical ports - the OS generally cannot be changed to the user's preference. From my perspective it is an "appliance", as with a SOHO router, or e reader.

As an appliance, designed for a consumer, rather than a PC user, with mainly entertainment/social/communications focused applications which are completely geared towards generating revenue, whether through sales of the application and/or by ads, data mining. tracking, etc... it may be a computer in the technical sense but that's just about where it ends.

As to their addictiveness, that seems beyond debate at this stage. As to health effects, we won't know the full impact until the current younger generation grow up - but these devices depend largely on ignorance and technical illiteracy of the end consumer and their apparent disregard for their own privacy, safety and security. The consumer simply trades those for the "toys" they are presented with. I recently installed an application for someone on Android and it refused to install unless it had access to GPS data, microphone, camera and more... I could not find any reasoning for this.

The "toys", in particular the "social networks", etc are a separate issue. They can be accessed from other devices such as real personal computers, but it's debatable if their "reach" would extend to what it is today without the "vehicle" of the smartphone. The entire GPS tracked, thing with a camera and microphone in your pocket seems to lend itself to those and it's likely that they account for the vast majority of devices accessing.

For me at least smartphone consumers != PC users. Most importantly, for the most part, they don't want to be.

@Turbocapitalist. If you are under the impression that previous generations of children entered school with a high degree of manual dexterity, you are mistaken. The truth is some were dextrous and some were clumsy. I was always clumsy. I knew how to hold a pencil correctly but it didn't make my handwriting any better. And I couldn't catch a ball to save my life.

The difference is that I spent every waking hour reading, not gazing at a screen, so at least my mind was getting fed.

With that being said, I've run Debian (no chroot) on a tablet, and Raspberry Pi is basically a nettop when you use it as one. These do sort of cross over into territory that overlaps with smartphones.

Ubuntu tried to make the smartphone more PC-like and failed. They tried to make their community more PC and as a result, made it corporate and apolitical with regards to computing and relevant activism.

The smartphone is a form factor, and some people are still (hopelessly or otherwise) trying to make a PC out of it. The latest from Alex Oliva on this goal is called "0g" but it's just at the research stage. Expect it to progress more slowly than Replicant, which is just Android with a lot of (awful) stuff removed and still moves incredibly slowly.

I think that's the key point here (or at least one of them - probably one of the main ones though); most people use their smartphone for entertainment and even talking to each other, even when they are in the same room anyway! :rolleyes:

So therefore the personal interaction is "replaced" by a device, and not to mention all of the implications that it entails, like bullying, "social status" (think "likes"), etc - as has been said in this very forum, there is no escape anymore. Back in the day, you could go home and not have to worry about bullies for example, now everything is online 24/7, and nearly everyone has a smartphone. I remember sitting on a train, and I was the only person NOT holding a smartphone in the palm of my hand, presumably posting narcissistic nonsense on one of the "social media" sites. What's that tell ya?

I don't pretend to know the causality, implications, psychology, sociology, etc, behind it. But when a friend and I both worked at the same company developing software, we both expressed surprise about seeing things such as, two people, sitting at desks almost next to one another, exchanging a form of text messages via their desktop computers, rather than speaking with one another in person.

For those suggesting that "smartphones" are not addictive because they are just small computers, and thus nothing new... I offer the following to counter that and to reassert that something nefarious is definitely afoot.

'Irresistible' By Design: It's No Accident You Can't Stop Looking At The Screen
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltech...-at-the-screen

Digital Dementia and ADD: How Smartphones Rewire the Brain
https://www.neurohealthservices.com/...wire-the-brain

How Technology Is Designed to be Addictive
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articl...to-addict.html

Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959

It’s not you. Phones are designed to be addicting.
https://www.vox.com/2018/2/27/170537...n-google-apple

Former Facebook executive: social media is ripping society apart
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-society-apart

​5 Ways Your Cell Phone Is Changing Your Brain
https://www.thealternativedaily.com/...ng-your-brain/

Smartphones Are Rewiring Your Brain
How many times have you looked at your phone today?
https://www.inverse.com/article/3820...ing-your-brain

What is Computer Addiction?
https://www.addictions.com/computer/

Firstly smartphones do run operating systems and a few run Linux. I can't get a TV to run any software other than that which makes it an appliance to do a handful of similar jobs, nor a fridge, a toilet, etc. Those are currently "dumb" embedded devices meant to be largely left alone to do a specific job, especially compared to some smartphones which can quite literally do everything on command a PC can, a very diverse array of jobs chosen by the specific owner/user. Need I remind you that gaming consoles are also PCs or at least can be with only changes in software and that many organizations still run super computers consisting of clusters of them?

SOME are embedded but by no means all. Some can install any software suitable for the platform which is simply a matter of cross-compiling or writing anew. Some now have both ports and docks by which those phones do have physical keyboards, mice, external drives but none of that matters any more than using a tractor or a Model T to power a sawmill means it cannot be driven. There is nothing to prevent a smartphone from being a PC, doing everything a PC can do and substantially more than your PII, 512MB, 1MB Graphics PC used to do, and some do that right now so it isn't even just hypothetical. Its real and realized.

You imagine PCs aren't geared toward generating revenue?... or that there aren't millions of PC users who do only a handful of entertaining activities with them? This is just use case or design imperative. There are OEM towers and tablets and laptops that are just as geared to lock users in and limit their user preferred flexibility and even some users who "jailbreak" them, just like phones.

I disagree. Phones don't inherently do all those negative things like eliminate privacy, software does and such software can be removed or never written in. On a hardware level there simply is no difference other than scale.

As for "addictiveness" I think we need to be very careful throwing around that term like some broad brush. Everything that is habit forming is not also addictive. I completely agree that an app that doesn't need to access GPS to do it's job demands to but again that is software not hardware and nothing prevents a coder from writing one that doesn't.

I've heard all of this "brain rot" rhetoric growing up about "boob tube" TVs, the internet and even PCs in general. It's just technophobia to me. I imagine, since I didn't live through it, the same sort of horror and disgust occurred when automobiles began to be driven by teenagers. I don't think I've ever seen a photo of 50 kids on horseback "wasting precious hours" cruising around a burger joint or hosting keggers on the beach. I do wonder what arguments people made to not become a telephone user back in the startup days of LandLine.... I mean people could listen in... the operators, party line users, OMG! Yeah, they still can but they don't have to.

Of course the developers of said software want people to use it - what's the bloody point in writing software for others to download, if you don't expect anyone to use it ? The same as the smartphone manufacturers want people to buy them, why else would they make them ?

How's that any different to PC's/etc/etc ?

The problem is that (and as I said above already), the "device (in this case a "smartphone") has "replaced" personal interactions - and more to the point; it's now done through a "device" rather than your lips.

Unless you're going for an Intel ME comparison here, the difference is the proprietary GSM stack infested with CALEA requirements-- which as long as they are connected to a battery, you really can't do anything about.

I physically disabled/removed the GSM chip on a smart phone once. It took out the GPS, Mobile and related capabilities, leaving the rest of the computer usable and rebootable as a mini wifi tablet and bluetooth device-- until I took it out of airplane mode, and essentially bricked it. At that point, it was definitely a computer. But as long as that GSM chip is in there, it's a bug. (If privacy is the goal, probably a good idea to remove the wifi/BT/mic as well.)

There are phones made that have actual On/Off switches. True some are not completely off when they say they are but some are and that's true of many modern electronic devices. I wasn't actively going for it but the Intel ME things is quite worrisome. I bought an old Core 2 Duo laptop exactly to avoid that.

Not so easy with a phone. Physical switches to isolate radio, mic and camera are good.

Then again, with a bowtie-shaped antenna less than two metres wide on an ordinary tripod, even your wired keyboard can be "wireless" to someone 50 metres away.

PC's were designed as tools/machines to do faster computations then humans could, which grew to include other conveniences. Now, given that one can become addicted to computers/internet etc..., the PC was not designed specifically to be/do so. The inverse is true for smartphones, they were designed as a mechanism to deliver specifically designed addictive applications/software. Much in the way of vaping/e-cigarettes are designed to deliver an addictive substance via a tool/delivery mechanism.

Much different from what you described above. Those smartphones are using the same psychological/behavioral methodologies of casinos and drug lords and people are carrying the delivery device in their pocket.