there are old folks who aren't that tech-savvy, and smartphones + plans are not that cheap or free in the US, we still have some extreme poverty, penetration is not 100%, if you're going to make smartphone a requirement to participate in society there really need to be super-cheap smartphone options.
Amusement parks are doing this now too and it's even crazier because many of them will not allow you to have your phone anywhere on your person while on the rides.
There are low end phone plans in the range of $10-15/mo. You can get a prepaid smartphone for like $40, and if you aren't using cellular data, you can get the smartphone itself for around $20.
Yeah, so I can wait in the lobby for 17 minutes while some 1.8 star museum app downloads to my phone over a crappy network that my provider lied about the performance of instead of someone just handing me a paper map.
We call them phones because that's what they evolved from but smartphones are fully functional computers that we can use anywhere with ease, and using cellular data to make phone calls is only one small facet of their usage.
For the overwhelming majority of people, being able to just pull up a map on their phone is the more convenient and preferred option. "Just handing you a paper map" is not so simple when you don't have paper maps because getting custom paper maps printed is expensive.
there are old folks who aren't that tech-savvy, and smartphones + plans are not that cheap or free in the US, we still have some extreme poverty, penetration is not 100%, if you're going to make smartphone a requirement to participate in society there really need to be super-cheap smartphone options.