In the past week, I’ve used my Android smartphone to make ten moves in Words with Friends, draw seven tiny pictures in Draw Something, send 33 text messages and scam on innumerable amounts of women on OKCupid. The amount of times I’ve used it to call someone? Three.
That falls in line with the numbers of a recent study from wireless company O2, which found that making calls is actually only the fifth-most popular use for a smartphone, lagging behind “browsing the Internet” and “listening to music. The full stats:
Minutes of activity per day:
Browsing the internet: 24.81
Checking social networks: 17.49
Playing games: 14.44
Listening to music: 15.64
Making calls: 12.13
Checking/writing emails: 11.1
Text messaging: 10.2
Watching TV/films: 9.39
Reading books: 9.3
Taking photographs: 3.42
Total: 128
With that in mind, it seems increasingly antiquated to keep calling smartphones “phones,” like calling cars “horseless carriages” or a train “the iron horse.” Clearly, they need a new name. What should we call them?
Some suggestions:
iPad minis
Gaze-holders
Text-boxes
Waisters (bastardization of time-wasters)
Populace pacification devices
Thumb-pads
Tweeters
