I really love all of the things that I can do with my smartphone these days that I'd never have been able to do with an older device (trying to even browse the Internet on a phone that I owned as recently as five years ago was painful), but I do miss a certain amount of reliability and hardiness of the older devices. Maybe nostalgia plays in a bit here, but I think that the move away from embedded device to general-purpose computer brought with it a lot of the downsides of the latter, along with the upsides.
As nice as it is to be able to watch an HD video stream on my pocket-sized computer on a stretch of rural highway halfway from nowhere, I don't always trust my phone to be able to, like, dial 911 when it really counts, and that's a little scary.
As nice as it is to be able to watch an HD video stream on my pocket-sized computer on a stretch of rural highway halfway from nowhere, I don't always trust my phone to be able to, like, dial 911 when it really counts, and that's a little scary.