Would You Give Someone A Smartphone For The Sake Of It?

Over the weekend I was down in East Cork with my mother. As usual there were a few “IT related” things that she wanted me to do .. nothing new there.

What was new, however, was that she was asking me about phones, data and smart phones in particular.

She currently has a very basic, yet functional, mobile phone. It *might* be able to check email and run a few basic apps, but I would be very surprised if it could do much beyond that.

The question asked was quite simple. Should she upgrade her phone.

I told her not to, as I couldn’t see any good reason for an upgrade. She uses email, but not that heavily. She might have a facebook account, but she’s not tied to it. She has profiles on a few other social networks, but she’s not active on any of them. All an iPhone (or similar) would give her is a larger phone bill, so I couldn’t see an upside to it.

I did, however, think that she might get use out of an iPad. I can actually see her using that and getting a kick out of it, though I’d want to get her a wifi only model.