Why Are We Still Calling the Things in Our Pockets ‘Cell Phones’?

[Commentary] When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to a Seattle stage to announce a new smartphone called the Amazon Fire, he spent an hour and a half describing feature after feature: unlimited photo storage, 24/7 video support, 13-megapixel camera, a 3-D-like "dynamic perspective" display, a visual-recognition shopping button called Firefly, and dozens more bells and whistles. But there was one question Bezos left unanswered about his new device's feature set. Namely: Could it, you know, make phone calls?

“I haven’t made a phone call on my phone in a long time,” Bezos said. “But I know people still make phone calls.”

Not so much. In fact, the use of voice calls -- which has been dropping since 2007, the year Apple introduced the original iPhone -- has fallen off a cliff lately. As of 2013, cell providers in the US are now making more money per user from data use than voice calling. (The US is only the seventh nation to reach the data-voice tipping point -- it happened in countries like Japan as early as 2011.)

A recent survey of 7,000 US high-school seniors found that only 34 percent made phone calls every day -- far fewer than the number who texted or used apps like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And companies like AT&T and Verizon, which saw the data boom coming years ago, have been spending more and more on new, bigger LTE data networks, while essentially giving away their voice plans for free.