I don't like smartphones, despite having owned one since they were called PDA phones. I like dumb phones less.

However, I don't like smartphones because they are shiny baubles designed to increase your engagement with them past the point where you benefit and well into the realm where you suffer. That aspect comes only from a permanent connectedness to a world you aren't standing in, however, and has nothing to do with the hardware.

They are unequal devices. Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption.

It's folly to think that all those Windows desktops running AOL and IE were devices for creation. Smartphones simply pare away all the shit that nobody was using anyway.

They are not real network clients.

Tell that to Facebook. Yes, I know. This is a whinge about how everything lives behind a server. Well of course it does. iPhones are designed for Kardashians. Give them a peer-to-peer network and the world will crumble within hours.

They have ruined web design.

This is patently false. The drive within smartphones is entirely towards silos, wherein your data lives within your UI and your protocols. The only outfits reliant on wireless web are those that spit it out of a Wordpress plugin or similar.

There are no secure smartphones.

...and very few secure desktops. Lookin' at you, Heartbleed.

They are devices of unclear alignment, or of clear malevolence.

"I don't like them." Speaking as someone with a rooted Android, I can speak to every bank, every website and every server I want to, including the adblock ones that I normally turn off.

With Android devices there is a distinction between “rooted” and “unrooted” devices, which sounds suspiciously similar to “jailbroken” and “unjailbroken”.

Yeah, the rooted ones run more software, and require a little more tweaking. See previous "Kardashian" point.

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

-Douglas Adams