[wyager]

I still can't justify anything better than my $20 Nokia burner phone.

There is literally nothing that has an advantage over it for me. Status and cost mean nothing.

I think the smart phone is purely an example of conspicuous consumption, nothing more.

[thirdsight]

See my other post: At least a smartphone was a consolidation of communication and entertainment devices. The pebble is none of that.

[noblethrasher]

I would like to see the relationship between "wearables" and smartphones reversed.

Ideally, most of the functionality of a smartphone will be realized in a watch/bracelet. Then, you could just access your data using various cheap dumb-terminals (e.g. tablets and phones). And, by "cheap", I mostly mean something that you could afford to lose since it wouldn't need to have a large cache of your data to be useful.

In other words, we're still keeping the consolidation, just moving it to a different place.