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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of people I know are buying top phones for things like: sending SMS, calls and camera.

Only my brother uses it for Internet browsing.

I know of only one guy who uses it for the agenda features (and it's a blackberry).

Facebook reports 78% of US daily users are mobile [1]; Twitter report 75% of monthly active users have used mobile [2]; and Amazon report 60% of customers shopped with a mobile device during the Christmas period [3].

Admittedly these headline figures appear to count users with any mobile activity, even if they have far more activity from other platforms.

I prefer desktop too, but I think it's a mistake to underestimate mobile.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/13/facebook-mobile-user-count/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/mobile-twitter-161m-access-...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/26/amazon-2014-holiday-sales/

The top end smartphones have cameras that are at least good enough to replace casual point and shoot cameras. Their excellent quality is worlds apart from the new Nokia phone's camera. While the vast majority of people use smartphones for calls, sms, and the camera, there is huge growth in mobile based purchasing, gaming, and social network usage. There are lots of different things that people do with smartphones, maybe not everyone uses the same app or game, but the flexibility of the smartphone makes it possible.

Top End smartphones might be able to replace a 8-10 year old P&S camera they still have respectively horrible cameras. But it doesn't really matter, no one prints photos any more, and with the amount of filters people stick on each photo it doesn't matter if you are making it with a 240p web cam or a 50MP DSLR it will all look the same.

The best camera is the one you have with you. Sure, my Canon DSLR takes nearly infinitely better pictures than my iPhone, but it's the iPhone that takes most of the pictures because it's the one in my pocket.

You are right, of course, that printing from a phone camera is futile, but printing from a P&S is much the same unless you've purchased something at the top of the line.

I think you would be surprised at how much closer a $200 Canon P&S is to your DSLR than your iPhone both in terms of image quality and precision of operation. If you know how to use one. Example: this was taken with a Canon Powershot A610 that cost me $250 around seven years ago: http://folk.ntnu.no/asmunder/files/images/nudibranch.jpg

Very nice pic from your Canon A610. Fully agree about P&S cameras today. I wouldn't run down the quality of today's top of the line phones, they're very good.

Me and my wife still do print a select number of photos. Whenever we travel we purposely take a couple of shots from her Lumix (a non DSLR but with replaceable lens) for the purpose of printing and putting it up on our "travel" wall. Not sure how it would look like if we used our phones to take those shots.

To counter an anecdote with an anecdote, almost everyone I know uses their phone more for Facebook/Twitter/Hangouts/Snapchat/etcetcetc than for SMS (and I can count the actual calls I've received in the last month on... 2 fingers).

Do you know any professionals? Everyone I work with uses calendar/agenda features...

Well then they are busy professionals. You almost make it sound like they are professional because they need a calendar :P That surely is not a criteria I'd use to consider one professional.

Well, that is not what I'm implying. If you work full time and aren't using email/calendar invites then I envy you. Many people in the corporate world have meetings with different people/departments/organizations on a frequent basis, even if you're not in a client facing role. Conference calls are also scheduled through calendar invites.

While this seems to be a battle of anecdotes, everyone I know who owns a smartphone uses it as their primary non-work email device, Facebook device, browsing device, LinkedIn device, etc. Many home personal computers no longer get turned on. It isn't a cell "phone" as much as it's simply a portal computing device.

It seems that HN now automatically applies a -1 to my posts. Add this to the cowardly slowban and I'm done with this site: The users have gotten stupider, the administrators are halfwits (I'm talking about you, dang), and its utility is gone.

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