This is this script of my national radio report yesterday on why there isn't so much excitement about new smartphone introductions these days. As always there may have been minor wording variations from this script as I presented the report live on air.

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So yeah, remember back when new smartphone introductions triggered fanfare and lines of people around the block waiting for hours or even days to get the latest iPhone? There was even a Simpson's episode that was a parody of Apple like that. Well, those days seem long gone now.

Sure, #Apple and #Google and others are in the midst of announcing new smartphones, but you don't really see the kind of excitement that there used to be. And there seems to be a bunch of reasons for this. First off, these phones, especially the incredibly expensive high-end models tend to be loaded down with so many features that the overwhelming vast majority of users never touch. The user interfaces keep changing and getting more complicated, so that even doing relatively simple tasks can be a chore. And this can be a problem even with many low-end smartphones now.

And the kinds of new features being touted don't necessarily inspire excitement either. The phone is even thinner! WOW! It's got #AI to feed you misinformation and claim to be helping you simplify your life, while actually making your life more complicated, and feeding it 24/7 to Big Tech. OH GOODIE!

One I had to chuckle over a bit when I heard it a few days ago was Apple announcing technical memory management improvements to help prevent app-based malware attacks. This is actually a good thing as far as it goes -- though there are lots of malware and phishing, etc. attack vectors still open. But I somehow doubt that "better memory partitioning and control" is really high up on most people's reasons for buying a new smartphone.

The firms keep announcing various camera improvements that sound technically advanced but then many people just use the phone cameras mainly for taking selfies anyway that would look about the same with far simpler phone camera systems. You have features now like selfies that can be modified by AI so that your selfie isn't even an actual image of yourself where you actually were, it's just an artificial creation. Interesting, but pointless, except for Big Tech who wants you hooked on their AI and ultimately willing to pay big bucks for it.

Now one of the actually useful features showing up on more phones is the ability to communicate with satellites for emergency texting or more general purpose texting, and eventually voice and data. This can be important if you're in areas without cell service, though due to satellite capacity issues terrestrial cell sites are likely to continue being the workhorse outside of rural areas. Thing is, you shouldn't need a high end ultra expensive smartphone for this kind of satellite capability, since essentially all these low orbit satellites are doing is emulating local ground-based cell sites.

The phone manufacturers REALLY want you buying their expensive models, or at least committing to mobile carrier contracts where they pay for some or all of the phone -- but then you're tied to that carrier for a year or more. The phone makers really enjoyed the era where it was more common for people to upgrade their phones every year or maybe two. But now more and more people are holding onto their phones much longer, and that changes the dynamics in all sorts of ways, including firmware updates and related security issues.

Another aspect of the situation is no matter what software tools are provided it can still be a confusing mess to migrate from an old phone to a new one including all the important app data, and of course many people have their lives utterly disrupted when they get locked out of their smartphones or they're lost or stolen.

For many people, smartphones have fallen from the amazing, wonderful tech category to in some ways the "necessary evil" category of tech, more like a set of shackles than a wondrous helper. So it's not surprising that when new smartphones are announced, so many people say "I'm not falling for it this time". And I agree.with them.

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L