I see the author's point, but I'd actually approach a solution in completely the opposite direction.
The whole reason the phone has become the all-in-one do-everything device is that the vast, vast majority of the time, most people aren't doing some highly specialised activity like skiing. Rather they're going about their daily lives, in a very predictable, stable environment. In that scenario, you want to optimise for convenience, which means portability, which means a small, light, touchscreen device that does everything well enough.
In the specialised activity usecase, you want precisely the opposite of the 'all in one convenience' approach - you want specialised tools that each do one thing really well. So you absolutely don't want to swap out your iPhone for an 'adventurePhone' which packs a load of features behind a specialised 'skiiing' interface - that's an unnecessary and almost certainly wasteful mix of specialised and generalised tools - what you do want is a set of specialised tools, each with its own ski-friendly interface, to give you exactly the feature set you want for your highly specialised activity.
Camera? GoPro. GPS? Garmin watch. Music? Ipod shuffle. Phone calls/SMS? extremely cheap Dual-SIM solid-as-a-rock dumb phone. Occasional use of chat app? Cheap, light dont-care-if-it-breaks android device.