I will admit that, for all my career is in IT, I'm rather a technical luddite; I want my phone to take and make calls, and precious little else. However, I've several times been required to use smart phones to test their suitability from an IT perspective within the company.

What I've found is that it doesn't make me more efficient; it merely lengthens my working day. All those little pockets of time I've historically used to take a pause and a deep breath before launching back into work start being filled up, with the result that I lose my ability to surface. Yes, it increases the timeframe during which I can work on systems, but it reduces the timeframe where I have a ready made excuse for sitting back and thinking about how or whether I should perform that system work.

And that's just during my working day. The previous poster's comments about family life ring true for me too, but the only redeeming feature for me about smart phones is that they're just as susceptible to the blackspot in which I live as normal phones, so they lose their ability to intrude on my family's time.

Smart phones are a tool, and a very impressive tool at that. If you find yourself frequently incommunicado when it's inconvenient, then perhaps they're just the tool for you. However, the trap many fall into is getting the tool first and then trying to find jobs for it to do, and that's just another tail wagging another dog.