My week without a smartphone

If you use a smartphone, you probably believe you can’t live without it. But having a smartphone is expensive. Depending on your carrier, you can easily spend $50 to $100 per month for the service, with half that cost going to the data plan — that is, the “smart” part. That’s real money.

My current smartphone contracts expires this week, and with the recent releases of the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III, I’ve been wondering whether I wanted to replace my iPhone 4 — and either lock myself into a new two-year contract or switch to a pay-as-you-go provider whose underlying network (Sprint in most cases, Verizon in a few) is limited to major cities and for which calls to family members will no longer be covered in a family plan.

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Plus, I have a cellular iPad, whose service I turn on when I travel. If I gave up my smartphone for a regular cellphone, I’d still have online access on the go. It’s true that the iPad is not as portable as the iPhone. I bring my iPad on trips and on my commute, but not when running errands around town or visiting friends; I always have my iPhone. But is that convenience worth the extra $30 per month it now costs me?

Before making a decision about a new smartphone, I decided to test whether I really needed to keep spending all that money. I turned off the cellular data on my iPhone so that it acted like a regular cellphone. Yes, I still had the Wi-Fi data connections and could use it for “smart” purposes when at home or at the office. I justified that by remembering that before I got an iPhone, I used an iPod Touch on Wi-Fi at both locations and as my music player during my commute.

Thus, my iPhone without cellular data became the equivalent of the regular cellphone and an iPod Touch I used to carry. (I never said I wanted to become a Luddite!)

To ease into the loss of always-available data service, I turned off the iPhone’s cellular data on a Friday evening. On Saturday, when we run our regular errands such as grocery shopping, I found myself twitching a bit as I couldn’t tweet while waiting for my coffee order or standing in the checkout line. I also couldn’t connect to the grocery store’s app to see what unadvertised specials were available.

Instead, I talked to my partner and lived without the secret specials, which is fine, as we do most of our shopping at the farmer’s market and Trader Joe’s, not the big grocery chain that dominates the area. And those tweets are for work, so not tweeting during personal hours was a healthy change, especially as it’s also on a device and service I don’t get reimbursed for. In all, they were beneficial shifts.

On Sunday, we ran some nonstandard errands, so I missed the ability to get directions through my iPhone (using Navigon, not Apple Maps!). Bit we had something called a printed map that kept us largely on track. In one case, there was a place we needed to find that we forget to map out ahead of time. Here’s where my iPhone-in-iPod-Touch mode saved the day: The hardware store we parked across from happened to have public Wi-Fi access, as did the café we visited later, so we could look up the directions for the place we missed. Remember when printed maps were the norm and finding Wi-Fi was an unexpected surprise? That Sunday, it became the norm again.

For the weekdays that followed, I wasn’t able to tweet to and from the office as I usually do — but that’s free work on my dime for my company, so I didn’t shed any tears for that loss. Nor did I mourn the lack of email — most of which is junk or irrelevant — during the commute. I did make sure I had downloaded the latest issue of the Economist; between that and a new David Brin book automatically downloaded into iBooks, I could read on the train while also listening to music. Again, I’d done the same when I used an iPod Touch and regular cellphone. It was nice to not tweet and check email, but instead simply read for that hour.

I did miss the fact that my iPhone’s voicemail doesn’t show the data on missed calls and messages that you get when cellular data is enabled — dialing into voicemail to see if I had any message felt like a very quaint activity. And I missed the ability to iMessage my partner en route home to coordinate dinner plans, as we usually do, but using SMS (a service we avoid due to its unconscionably high fees) would have solved that issue on a regular cellphone.

On Saturday morning, I turned the iPhone’s cellular data back on. I’ve tried very hard to not get caught up in the always-tweeting mode and always-email mode in the week since. I’ve been pretty successful so far.

If I were frequently on the road, such as for sales or onsite repairs, my experience without the “smart” part of the smartphone might have been impossibly frustrating — or not. After all, when I travel, my iPad is my primary data access device, with my iPhone serving more as a music player and, when I’m in frenetic mode, the quick access to email while the plane is taxiing or I’m taking the shuttle to the car rental — that is, when the iPad is out of reach. Seriously, the email can wait during those 10 to 15 minutes.

I’m not suggesting that everyone could as easily give up the “smart” in their smartphone — and I doubt many people could give up the “smart” altogether by also forgoing Wi-Fi devices such as an iPod Touch or iPad. But I did realize that the $30 per month on cellular data is a convenience, not a necessity. And under the new breed of data plans, you’re likely paying much more than that.

At the end of this week, my current cellular contract expires. I still don’t know what I will do. I don’t see any urgency in getting a new smartphone — the iPhone 4 works just fine, thank you — and committing to two more years. I’m not willing to opt for a pay-as-you-go provider with sketchy service quality, especially as it requires you to pay full freight for a new smartphone that won’t work on other networks.

I’ll probably just convert to month to month using my existing iPhone 4. One thing I do know: I won’t pay more for data than I’m paying now. At my average 400MB per month of data usage, I’m already forking over too much for the convenience.

This article, “My week without a smartphone,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.