That doesn't seem to be the case based on the absolutist post.
The older ones are going for sub $100 USD. There are data plans for ~$50/month
Not that costly IMO

Wouldn't the equivalent statement be more like "using washing machines instead of banging your clothes on rocks in a river makes you weaker"?

Anyway, the actual research only found a correlation. Any claims that smartphones "make you" anything are just speculation.

Yeah, that's true, it is just a correlation. You'd need another study to show that smartphones make people dumber rather than dumb people migrating to smartphone use. I can't be sure which one it is, but I don't think smartphones will make you smarter in any case. Although they could potentially make you smarter, they just are not used that way.

There are people who have smart phones and use them for GPS, phone calls, and things like email or searching for times when I'd say it's appropriate. I.e. at a stable point in motion, an exception case, where they can benefit by having the convenience of looking something up.

And then there are people who have smart phones and use them for GPS, phone calls, and things like facebook and twitter and you see them walking with their phones paying full attention to their phones and not to the world around them, nor their kids, or pets, or whatever.

Funny story that just happened. I was shopping and some random guy caught my attention because I heard the very loud dial tone, dial digits, and answer by girlfriend/wife, he's there with his arms stuffed and using his speaker phone, yelling at it, we can hear her too. All he's asking is where she was, because they separated once within the store. Rather obnoxious IMHO.

Well, he went to grab one more item and dropped his zillion dollar smart phone in fantastic, flipping-almost got it fashion, and BOY did it shatter! I couldn't help smirking, a lady nearby caught me doing it, she gave me a minor admonishing look then shared her smirk too. His loud swearing didn't help people to have much sympathy.

I've got a Samsung Convoy 2 flip phone. Does calls, and that's it. It can text, but it's not on our plan and I don't think I would use it anyway. And durability? I could throw my phone at a brick wall, and my biggest concern would be that I would lose the top part of the case (it isn't a very tight fit). I've had it for three years, and the battery will still last at least a week, usually longer.

Remember Nokia 3310? Anyway the smartphones and tablets have another weakness - you can't dial blindfolded.

I had the 3330 -- it had WAP, you know...
It was fun to have such a pared-down WWW on the phone though -- reminiscent of using Gopher, or whatever it was, to look for ftp sites.
I would like to say I could type on this device one-handed but, sadly, my touch-typing skills are terrible especially since I've been using computers with qwerty keyboards for the majority of my life. I think though, at a pinch, I could dial blindfold.

Edit: Off topic, sorry, but this reminds me that I read an article a while ago about a woman who unlocked her laptop and typed out an email with her feet, since she was tied to a bed by an intruder. I hate to think how many hours it would take me to type my laptop's password using only my feet.

$50/month ($600/yr) is costly!
There is a lot of money being sunk in to be simple, rather then considering how much of each you actually use.
I pay a fraction of that with pre-pay

Laptops and desktops can be cumbersome - but the smartphone is just too small to be really useful.
You get some mobility with greatly restricted usability. I mean really, please tell me your typing speed on a keyboard the size of your palm, or how easy it is to read a wiki page when the screen takes up the other side of your palm.

I genuinely dislike smartphones. They feel far too restricted. Too... one-touch.

If I wanted simple and easy with reduced functionality, I'd be using MS or Mac.

Keep in mind I pay $50 for cable internet ... and get 6Mbps for that price.
I disagree. Also, a smartphone can often share it's mobile connection over WIFI
With practice, I can type (using gesture typing) up to 30 WPM. On my tablet, I can type up to 40WPM.

Reduced functionality compared to a desktop or even a laptop. But certainly improved functionality over
nothing at all.

Don't get me wrong, I am not the person that is glued to a smartphone all the time. I don't use facebook or twitter either. But I think smartphones have their place.

I DO detest the concept of tablets and phones completely replacing laptop and desktops.

Oh Yeah it is! My understanding is that I could pay $40/mo for a smart phone plan, get data, talk, text. That's still a lot.

I agree that tablets and phones have some utility. I got a tablet for work because we needed to develop apps for clients. Honestly I look at what I really can do with it. Email, web access provided I have WIFI, and that's about it. I personally use it for music and books at the gym and store photos on it to show to friends and family. I tried to use it for note taking, documents, or looking at/editing code. No sense. It's not blindness, the screen is just too small for details like that, taking in fractions of phrases at a time is a waste, it's obnoxious. If I literally shrink a document to fit a whole page on the 7" screen, then it is too small, so I have to expand that which means I expand it so that the left-right margins go beyond the screen and hence I have to shift it around to view it all. That's obnoxious. It's like I'm putting in as much effort to visually see the document as I am at concentrating about reading it. And if you type, well the on screen keyboard then shrinks your real estate. How not nice is that?

So sure, I can "live" with a tablet and literally do some stuff, but given the alternatives of a full screen desktop or a 15" screen laptop, or both, the full mouse and keyboard both rule over touch. So for convenience and brevity, great. Surprisingly I also do not do the very brief email replies of "Thx!" or "Gr8!" accompanied with the phrases "Sent by my bleeping iPhone! Please excuse any typing errors" I find that to be obnoxious. There are typos and there are typos. Them happening because of literally fat fingering a touch screen and the auto-word-complete screwing over the touch'er, is a joke. I also cannot condone allowing that to happen and have some bad word or phrase end up in my correspondence inadvertently for a business email of all things!!

Here's where they may have a market with me:

Given the tablet I have, WIFI is actually fine. It usually works many places and I also can live without it on the road. It does have GPS if things get really bad, but they don't or haven't yet. Plus that GPS actually can find me "gas, food, lodging" even if I don't wish to see what the next exit will reveal. So I actually would've been happy to buy a cheap or reconditioned smart phone (1) mostly for the camera because my digital camera is old, broken, it was like $50 anyways (2) could still use it for music at the gym, and more conveniently than my 7" tablet, I could actually strap it to my arm when running, and it'd be a phone. Problem is one cannot get a non-data plan for that type of phone. You basically have to shop around, but I'm doubting yet that you can get a very basic plan for that type of phone, talk only where you could just renew as far as every 3 months providing you don't use it much. For instance, a friend has a regular flip phone and he says he pays like $30 every three months merely because it would expire after 3 months and he never hits the minimum usage either, but that's his plan.

So I'd probably buy a reconditioned iPhone and use it for some of that fun stuff, use it at my home, work, doctors office, etc when under WIFI, but really only look to use it as a phone as far as a telecommunications plan. If they were to offer that, I'd like it. Maybe that is available, I don't really toil at looking, I tried once and didn't succeed.

Hmm.. It sounds like you are justifying the price point by comparing it to your cable bill.
That makes it difficult to objectively value the cost/benefit of it since it "sets" something to compare it to. However if you share the wifi with your laptop/desktop and cut off the cable internet I could see that being a fair comparison.
In any case. I don't think that I could justify paying that much (even though it is "unlimited") That's IMO from a perspective of a pre-paid user though.

I'm genuinely impressed, considering how small those things can be.
I presume you mean with full keyboard access? E.g. correct use of capitals, full spelling of words, special characters ((),.?!:;'"etc)?
The reason I ask is in my experience doing exactly those things makes everything immensely more difficult since the keyboard is so small, you must cross multiple menu's to use such trivial keys as a comma.

A sibling of mine bought a cheap android phone ($30) and ended up giving it to me - I now use it with juicyssh as a remote control to my media server on a screen with mplayer.
The battery life is amazing with airplane mode on (no phone connection)
It also logs into the media screen session automatically thanks to a bit of code in my .bashrc

I think looking up instructions and others' ideas beats throwing my own ignorant spaghetti against the wall.

Capitals letters and periods are mostly handled automatically. Every once in a while you have to go back and fix it (which is a pain) but it mostly handles it.
Its true that parentheses, quotes, commas, exclamation marks and question marks do slow things down a bit. I hate typing BBcode because square brackets
requiring two menus deep. Another thing that slows it down is words that are not supported by gesture typing.

So 30 WPM is with simple sentences and minimum punctuation. With a complex sentence, I would say more like 20WPM.

I personally don't understand how people pay $400-$700 for these things new. For something that is the size of your hand
and isn't THAT much better than the last two models, it's hard to justify the new price.

Just a bunch of stereotypical BS. Infact if we look at stuff like here we can remember that we used to tell that story about anything.