Clearly, a smart phone is not the device for you then.
It's not just 'a damn phone'.
- It's a super computer in your pocket that gives you access to any bit of data you want from anywhere in the planet right now.
- It's a high-end camera for photos and videos. For normal stills, panoramic shots, slow-mo, and time-lapse.
- It's a world-class viewer for photos/videos/and pretty much any type of electronic media you want.
- It gives you access to virtually all music every created by man along with most movies and tv shows.
- It's a high-resolution GPS device that lets you know where you are and how to get to anywhere you want to go. It'll even help with traffic and construction issues.
- It's an instant messenger that makes it trivial to communicate instantly and with photos/videos/links/map locations/etc with anyone you want.
- It's a calendar/scheduling device that can remind you when things are coming up soon, lets you easily look up and search through years worth of dates to instantly find the event you were looking for. You can even have shared calendars with whomever (family members, etc) to coordinate events, etc.
- It's an alarm clock with however many times/tones/repeat-patterns as you want. Also a timer and a stopwatch.
- It's a device that has access to any social media platform you want at a moment's notice.
- It's a device that lets you video communicate with others in high resolution, using any of the multiple cameras it has.
- It's a device with a never-ending catalogue of apps that utilize so many aspects of the device to do wonderful things (eg. simply by 'listening' to whatever music is playing in your location, it can identify the artist, song, album, provide lyrics and even let you get the song on your device ... all within seconds). This makes your device so many things. It's an astronomer's tool (SkyGuide), it can help you find restaurants you want, help you figure out your day in DisneyLand, use it as a VNC client to remotely log in and control your computers, etc. This bullet point alone could fill pages and is one of the most powerful aspects of something like an iPhone.
- It's a device that is a pretty kick-ass fitness tracker. This coupled with the previous bullet-point and the advent of nutrition/health/etc trackers lets you keep track of and easily manage all manner of fitness oriented goals.
- It's a banking device, letting you quickly and easily manage finances/payments/etc.
- ApplePay
- It has enough horsepower to run AR apps to let you see the world with new and useful data overlaid on top of it.
- It's a device that lets you stream just about anything from the internet and onto your other devices (eg. your tv via AppleTV)
- It's a device that integrates and syncs up with all your other Apple devices (desktop, iPad, watch, etc) so that everything you do, you can do on whichever device you want, whenever you want, and it's all there.
- It's a device that can be voice controlled and talk back to you.
- It's a device that you can use to almost instantly translate from one language to another, totally by voice if you'd like.
- It has a super high resolution display, bluetooth connection to whatever headphones/audio-devices you want, and world-class biometric security. Oh, and a flashlight.
- Tons more.
... and it fits in your pocket.
These are just some of the things I use
my iPhone for. It is not just 'a damn phone'. It's so far from being just 'a damn phone' that the term iPhone is really a misnomer these days. Indeed, I think the definition of the word 'phone' is going to change over time to incorporate the monumental number of things these devices can do.
So, really, if all you want is a phone, yeah, there are many options out there that are waaaaaay cheaper than a marquis smart phone to make phone calls with.
