I work in the communications industry. We do Two-Way Radios, Wireless Long-Range Private Data, Back-Bone and Last-Mile, Security Systems, Wireless Remote Control Systems, etc., etc., etc. We are also a United States Cellular Agent…
This is just my take on things, but…
If you don’t need a “smart phone” I’d stay away from them. Smart phones aren’t near as robust as many of the others… they can’t be, simply because of what they are. They also require more power, partly because have a lot of things “running” in the background, which means you’ll need to charge it more often.
Of course if you just “want” one for the entertainment and “cool” factor… well, that’s a different thing all together. Personally, I don’t carry a “smart phone”, I’m not into “gadgetry” and such… I don’t even know how to send a text message and just recently learned how to read one (daughter showed me). I just want my phone to ring when someone calls, and I want theirs to ring when I call them… I “need” nothing more than that. If it wasn’t for the fact that I “need” to be accessible when out of the office on-the-road for work… I probably wouldn’t even have a cell phone.
Right now I carry a Motorola Quantico… built to Mil-Spec it’s tough, water resistant and has held up to some pretty hard use/abuse. It has more features than I “need” (they tell me it has a built-in camera [shrug])… but I like the “tough” part. I dropped it 50 feet off a tower one day (into the grass) and it never hiccuped, it’s been drenched in the rain more than once, sat on, stepped on, bounced off concrete, dropped in wet concrete, dropped in mud puddles, left outside in below zero temps, I even accidentally dropped it in my coffee cup once. It is just a bit bulkier than I like, but it has never failed to work. The new Mil-Spec phones coming out are thinner and I’ll probably switch to one of those soon.