His phone is "dumb" but mobile. So, I'm more old fashioned than he is because my phone is "dumb" but a wire-line desk set and not mobile. Why? Because when I

His phone is "dumb" but mobile. So, I'm more old fashioned than he is because my phone is "dumb" but a wire-line desk set and not mobile. Why? Because when I use the phone, I want the rest of my relevant stuff handy -- paper and pen for notes, various papers, and relevant data on my computer. But I can't make or receive mobile calls? Right. To receive a call while I am traveling, my voice phone provider, also my ISP, has a message recorder, and then I can get the message via e-mail and download it. Really, for most calls, I would not want to receive a call while traveling because then I would not have materials, desk, etc. to be able to handle the call well. E.g., maybe I'm walking down an isle at a grocery store looking for a one quart or larger jar of sweet pickle relish and get a phone call about something important where I have no desk to take notes, note pad, background info, privacy, etc. No thanks. For making calls while traveling, mostly I don't want to do that either. My work is to write my software, and I don't travel much. So, when traveling, I would only call for car emergencies, and those are too rare to be worth having a mobile phone, data plan, keeping batteries charged, etc. And now I'm concerned about privacy: As it is, there is no way the NSA or FBI can track me via my smartphone signal because I have no smartphone! So, the NSA and FBI can't use a smartphone to track me to my local convenience store to buy gas for my car and lawn mower, milk, French vanilla ice cream, and wheat bread, to a local pizza shop for a pickup for dinner, to Sam's Club, Wal-Mart, and A&P for groceries, cat food, etc., to a coin laundry (until I get my Maytag fixed), to Chinese carry-out, to a hardware store to get epoxy resin glue to fix loose joints in wooden furniture, two cycle oil for my grass trimmer, wet-dry sand paper to use for sharpening my French chef's kitchen knife -- really top national security stuff like that! Mostly my information, especially that relevant to phone calls, is on my computer which is in a mid-tower case on a table at home and usually in front of me and, thus, also not mobile. E.g., for a phone number, that's on my computer with other relevant info and easy to find with some of my software. And I have a little very simple software to dial phone numbers -- just write some characters to a COM port starting with AT and have the phone wires going into and out of an old FAX modem (also good for sending letters via FAX to my reps in Congress). For a mobile phone to have my collection of phone numbers, I would have to copy over the data and, in the future, sync the two locations of my data. Also a smart phone, with maybe something from Microsoft an exception, won't run my most heavily used piece of software that, in particular I use for managing information relevant to phone calls, my favorite text editor. If my favorite editor were emacs, then maybe it would also run on a Linux based smartphone. But, as it is a smartphone is a computer but a pain to use instead of my main computer and, then, a sync issue. If Microsoft wants to do something to get ahead, then they should make much more clear how to do syncs, backups, restores, including of options on software, and the boot partition, and how to use a home computer as a server for mobile devices, e.g., give good explanations of VPNs and other security issues of opening my main computer to access from mobile devices. Finally, if I had a smartphone, then it might get stolen, and the data on it might be confidential. Even worse, if the smartphone had an easy way to get a VPN connection back to my main computer as a server, then maybe all of the data on my main computer -- e.g., my software which should be treated as a trade secret -- could be stolen. Also, now police seem to like to take smartphones and look through all the data, photographs, etc. there and strain to find excuses to start big legal cases. Also, with my smartphone in their hands and a VPN connection back to my main computer, they would also have my trade secret software. If I have no smartphone, then police can't grab it and violate my Fourth Amendment rights. If I had a smartphone and had it visible and if there were some police doing something or other, then the police could go wacko (they basically don't like citizens recording or even watching what they do and know that in practice they can get away with a lot of bullying of citizens they don't like), accuse me of taking their pictures, rough me up, arrest me, search my car, plant drugs in my car and then charge me with possession of drugs, take my smartphone, etc. They could take my car. In searching my car, they could find excuses to trash my car, e.g., cut open the seats. If I had a dog, then they could find an excuse to shoot my dog. Just having a smartphone could trigger some not very nice police to get me into a lot of legal trouble for no more reason than my just having a smartphone. Indeed, likely police are afraid of smartphones. With no smartphone, police have fewer excuses to bully me around, get their sadistic enjoys, and get me into a lot of legal trouble for no reason at all.