Doug almost the same thing here.
I also work in IT and have never owned a smart phone nor wanted one.
I have the cheapest plain Jane cell phone I can buy, it does talk and text only.
About 95% of my cell minutes get burned up by work pages generated by the servers.
I make maybe 1 possibly 2 personal voice calls a month and perhaps 3-4 personal text messages a month.
All the rest of the usage goes to service work pages. The people that I keep in touch with I talk to via email or FB messages.
That is why until this year, I simply unplugged when I went out to bonneville and would drop off all the forums, FB and email, because I literally had no way to do it out there by choice.
That said, I prefer text messages over voice calls by a wide margin, with email a close second.
I work night shifts and the last thing I want to do is get woken up at 10:00 AM (my 5:00 in the morning) by some sales call, and for some reason my friends don't appreciate a voice phone call at 2:00 AM in the morning which is my early evening (like normal people's 8:00 pm). With text and email I can answer a message 6 hours after it is sent and everyone is happy. Also where I live and work voice cell service sucks unless I go outside the building, and chatting on phone on the sidewalk in a snow storm is not high on my fun list.
My recent purchase of a tablet is a middle ground, it does not make phone calls, which is a good thing in my world, but it can send and receive email (something I could not do on my old school cell phone).
I can also use it to post on a few forums and check weather forecasts etc. which is what justified its purchase.
I personally would love to get a push text message update about Bonneville events, but I completely understand folks who have other habits of communication and other preferences.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/09/19/americans-and-text-messaging/According to Pew Research just a bit over 1/4 of Americans do not use text messaging at all.
Some 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages.
My personal use of text messages and voice calls is an order of magnitude lower than average users.
I personally hate blind calling people I don't know very well, unless they have told me when it is a good time to call them.
I won't even answer a voice phone call from an unknown number. If they are a friend and know me they know to send me a text message.