While I have a smartphone , I think of myself as not particularly using it all that much. I got a smartphone quite late, it spends a lot of its life merely sitting there (not even necessarily in the same room as me, especially at home), and while I installed various apps (such as a SSH client) I rarely use them; they're mostly for weird emergencies. Then I suddenly couldn't use my current smartphone any more and all sorts of things came out of the woodwork, both things I sort of knew about but hadn't realized how much they'd affect me and things that I didn't even think about until I had a dead phone.
The really obvious and somewhat nerve wracking thing I expected from the start is that plenty of things want to send you text messages (both for SMS authentication codes and to tell you what steps to do to, for example, get your new replacement smartphone). With no operating smartphone I couldn't receive them. I found myself on tenterhooks all through the replacement process, hoping very much that my bank wouldn't decide it needed to authenticate my credit card usage through either its smartphone app or a text message (and I was lucky that I could authenticate some things through another device). Had I been without a smartphone for a more extended time, I could see a number of things where I'd probably have had to make in-person visits to a bank branch.
(Another obvious thing I knew about is that my bike computer wants to talk to a smartphone app ( also ). At a different time of year this would have been a real issue, but fortunately my bike club 's recreational riding season is over so all it did was delay me uploading one commute ride.)
In less obvious things, I use my smartphone as my alarm clock. With my smartphone unavailable I discovered that I had no good alternative (although I had some not so good ones that are too quiet). I've also become used to using my phone for a quick check of the weather on the way out the door, and to check the arrival time of TTC buses, neither of which were available. Nor could I check email (or text messages) on the way to pick up my new phone because with no smartphone I had no data coverage. I was lucky enough to have another wifi-enabled device available that I took with me, which turned out to be critical for the pickup process.
(It also felt weird and wrong to walk out of the door without the weight of my phone in my pocket, as if I was forgetting my keys or something equally important. And there were times on the trip to get the replacement phone when I found myself realizing that if I'd had an operating smartphone, I'd have taken it out for a quick look at this or that or whatever.)
On the level of mere inconveniences, over time I've gotten pulled into using my smartphone's payment setup for things like grocery purchases. I could still do that in several other ways even without a smartphone, but none of them would have been as nice an experience. There would also have been paper cuts in things like checking the balance on my public transit fare card and topping it up.
Having gone through this experience with my smartphone, I'm now wondering what other bits of technology have quietly infiltrated both my personal life and things at work without me noticing their actual importance. I suspect that there are some more and I'll only realize it when they break.
PS: The smartphone I had to replace is the same one I got back in late 2016, so I got a bit over nine years of usage out of it. This is pretty good by smartphone standards (although for the past few years I was carefully ignoring that it had questionable support for security bugs; there were some updates, but also some known issues that weren't being fixed).