It's not a phone to me, it's a pocket computer with shovelware telephony that I'd rather do without. Just give me a data pipe, I'll figure out the voice communication part.

What a weird argument. Just because it can receive phone calls doesn't mean that you shouldn't also be able to be uninterrupted if you like.

It is a mobile computing device that happens to be able to take calls.

"Smart phones" are "phones" in only so much that they can make phone calls. I've used my smart phone to make a call one time in the past 8 years. For me, it simply isn't a phone.

Most of my peers use their mobile computing devices to browse the internet, schedule things, and play games. Very, very few of them use it to make phone calls and those that do are calling family or their SO a majority of the time.

> It is a phone. If you need uninterrupted productivity, use any other type of personal computing device.

Phones have stopped being just phones for a while now. Modern smartphones are full fledged computing devices and are a key productivity tool for many users.

Personally I hardly even use the phone feature to justify calling my device a phone. I make maybe one or two traditional phone calls a month, as most of my day-to-day communications is done over the Internet.

Not a solution, for obvious reasons which have already been covered. These alerts show up on your other devices as well. Furthermore, your bias aside, the fact is that phones are the primary productivity device for hundreds of millions of users.