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Comment by azerty101 | Hacker News Reader

You can definitely live with a voice-only phone, though the current models are horrible (I miss the real Nokia phones).

If you want to live luxuriously, also put a netbook, X1 Carbon, MacBook Air, whatever, in your backpack, then you have Internet, too.

This is not an excuse for the outrageous tracking plans of Apple and Google, I just hope more people will do this as a reaction to those plans.

EDIT: I may have misunderstood the "no alternative", I assumed it was about the need to own a "smart" phone.

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>You can definitely live with a voice-only phone

This is likely to be untrue in the immediate future. This is probably already true in places like China, where mobile payments are the norm.

As a personal example, and I know this does not yet apply to the US, but where I live it is impossible (or so inconvenient that it might as well be not possible) to do some banking operations without an Android or iOS device, as even accessing my bank's website requires me to have the app installed for token generation. I'm sure if I shopped around I could still find a smaller bank without such a requirement or live with the limitations, maybe finagle a way to use an emulator or something equally inconvenient, but I'm quite certain that this will not last and a smartphone will become essential. A lot of other things are also quite inconvenient without a smartphone around here.

I know the US and Europe have a distinct resistance to the smartphone (or even the computer) becoming required to live as anything but a homeless vagrant because their economies and infrastructure developed before smartphones were even an idea, which gives them the luxury to resist these technologies on moral grounds, or even on the grounds of not wanting to learn the new thing. On the other hand, countries whose economies developed in lockstep with cellular technologies and smartphones (China, India, much of Africa, South-East Asia, much of Latin America, etc.) don't have that particular luxury or simply take a much more pragmatic approach to the whole thing. In these places it is already incredibly inconvenient to get by without a smartphone and will likely become impossible in the near future, if it isn't already.

When smartphones and the internet do become essential to life, I can only hope that the laws of the land have managed to catch up by then. I am not particularly optimistic on this aspect, though, and I suspect it will take some kind of major disaster and/or abuse of human rights (or more likely, a series of them) to happen for another "age of enlightenment"-like period to happen, focused on information technology this time.

EDIT: spelling

> resistance to the smartphone (or even the computer) become required to live as anything but a homeless vagrant

Yeah. Because they can run out of power, they are easily damaged, and, generally, bug and exploit ridden.

A bank card is near indestructible.

Do you know the size of fraud departments at banks and payment providers, and the budgets going into fraud prevention every year? A bank card is as easily destructible as a smartphone is, but is far less secure, as we're sacrificing security for usability.

If we're comparing smartphone vs bank cards, it's only fair to presume that the bank cards are equipped with EMV, because magstripe terminals won't be able to accept smartphone either. In that case, I fail to see any security advantage over smartphones.

Magstripe terminals can accept smartphone generated pins with a software update, you just enter the (OTP) pin manually.

I've seen this used at Wells Fargo ATMs.