Recently I answered a phone call on my cell phone in the presence of a friend; that’s the phone in the picture to the right. My friend looked at my phone and said, “The 90s called–they want their phone back.” Very funny.

The fact is, it is a pretty basic phone. His point was that it’s not an iPhone–or something like it that has lots of bells and whistles and can log onto the internet, play back the complete canon of classical music, and store every picture ever taken of every single one of your relatives.

But even a fairly basic phone like mine has games, camera, a voice recorder, organizer, alarm, calendar, calculator, tip calculator, timer, stopwatch, etc., etc., etc. In other words, one “bare bones” cellphone probably has as much computing technology as the early Apollo missions.

But my friend’s right. The fancy-schmancy iPhones and their ilk probably have enough attached gadgetry to provide the computing needs of a small corporation. But frankly, to upgrade phones would complicate my life because I would feel the stress of learning how to use all the features.

I wish I could blame my aversion to the higher-end phones to generational differences. But I was chastened last night when two people I was with who must be nearing 80 took out their iPhones and navigated them with the agility of 8th graders. Humbling.