I should disclose something: Ever since I dropped $300+ on a Motorola V600 circa 2004, I have been a smartphone addict. V600, RAZR, Blackberry Pearl, currently the Tmobile G1, and I can’t help but eye The Droid Incredible.

Then, a few days ago I came across the Nokia C1-00. As I pored through it’s specs (6 week standby time, ~$40 unsubsidized cost, and Nokia’s history of unbreakable phones) I asked myself:

Are smartphones a net-positive impact on my life?

of course they are

This is going to be the easy section to write. I mean, for just a few hundred dollars + an overpriced contract, you can:

• Know all the best restaurants and get reservations
• Never be lost
• Always know where your friends are
• Be up to date on all the news I could ever care about.
• Share things instantly
• Take photos + video at a whim
• Read almost any type of content you can imagine
• More… just google best apps and you can spend the rest of your life reading about them

If you had those capabilities in the 90s, you might have been regarded as some kind of uber-person… the guy who has it all.

Today? H-hum. Everybody has those capabilities.

But nothing’s free, so what price are we paying for being so awesome?

maybe not so much

I’ve written before about the attention cost of all our stuff, and nowhere is it more evident than smartphones.

Just think for a moment of all the reasons you might glance at your phone. Do you have any messages? What time is it? How is my signal? Is Wi-Fi on? How is my battery doing?

That doesn’t even include options: What temperature is it? What is the next song on my playlist? What is the next task on my to-do list? What was my last financial transaction?

And so on.

Right about now, you might be thinking to yourself ”well I don’t think about each of those things every time I look at my phone, just the information I’m interested”.

False. You process it all.

Both the android and iPhone OS represent the information you desire, in icons designed so to be so simple you can’t help process them. To not process them would be akin to looking at C-H-E-E-S-E, and telling your brain not to process those individual letters into the word cheese.

I can’t do it. You can’t either.

to keep the phone?

I’m not saying we should forsake our smartphones for want of the simple life. What I’m saying is that while commercials tout the “benefits” of the iPhone and Droid, perhaps they are using the term too liberally.

Perhaps we would all be better off if we realized that benefit is only determined by utility & cost, but utility, cost, and attention.