I have a friend who used the starTac until AT&T forced him into something else. He fought for months trying to keep his old phone working. He moved to an iPhone but says it doesn't compare.
Smart phones compensate for lower call quality and reception with their processors and apps, there is always going to be a tradeoff, to most it is worth it but if your business relies on a lot of phone calls and being able to take those calls wherever you are then having something like the StarTac is great.
But, to be honest, I quite miss my Nokia 3210 which had fantastic battery life, never dropped calls, got reception in places my iPhone never does, and never, ever spent ages trying to send an iMessage instead of an SMS when there's a really bad 3G or 2.5G signal (which frustrates me almost to the point of violence).
It'd be awesome if my sim card ( or something the size of the old simcards ) had as much storage as it could manage. With today's microSD densities, you can realistically hold everything and more than what's on your phone (though the storage medium itself is less resilient..).
Then you go to work, pop it in your hardcore resilient phone. Go home, pop it in your tablet. This however empowers users almost exclusively, there isn't much advantage to a consortium of companies implementing this.
When calling on my iPhone the call quality is significantly higher in many cases. I'm not sure if it requires both callers to be on an iPhone or on the same carrier or what. But sometimes the calls are as good as the audio coming from the Music app. Other times, they sound like StarTAC calls. But something has definitely changed in the last few years for certain types of calls. (And I've found FaceTime audio calls are always high quality audio.)
That said, if it is iPhone to iPhone, it may well be that the call never touch the carrier systems and instead happens over iMessage for all i know.
That would only happen if you are using Facetime Audio
Of course, touchscreen phones make great computing devices, which makes their inadequacy as phones irrelevant.
Sure I could combine them in an iPhone, but I don't think they need to be tied together.
But apparently they have now announced that they are end of life.
The idea of carrying a single object that is your means of communication / music player / camera / train ticket / monetary instrument / entertainment center is neat, until you think about your battery dying / losing it / dropping it and having it crack in half when you're a hundred miles from home.
I guess it is less bad if you tend to travel in packs, and would always have a backup in that way.
I seem to have passed peak-smartphone, I check it much less often, and phone more. I've been tempted a few times by the flip-smartphones that exist in the Far East - I wish they were available here so I could trial one in a store. Don't want to buy until I decide if they're best of both worlds, or worst...
Not exactly the same, but I've noticed that if I type with my eyes closed, I'm both faster and make fewer errors than when I look at the screen. I guess its because I can just let my muscle memory do its thing without distraction.
It's really annoying to be forced in the direction of fake technological "progress" that's mostly a result of extensive marketing. There is no fundamental reason why a smart phone can't have proper keys for calling.
There are couple of Android flip phones on the market, but since Android UI is designed 100% for touchscreens, I am pretty sure the experience of using them will be horrible.
[1] http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/9018-large/Samsung...
They have some decent hardware in there; shame it's so difficult to make it do anything interesting!