For you, I can’t say, but for me the answer is a solid no.
• I want a phone that that doesn’t follow me around. I don’t need to get a reminder from the dentist’s office while I’m lunching with a friend—or while I’m sleeping. People who call early in the day can leave a message. The landline rings in another part of the house and I don’t hear it from the bedroom. At night (and well into the morning) my cellphone stays by the bed for calls from family members.
• I want a phone that always stays in one place so I can find it. When I misplace my cellphone, I can call the number from my landline and locate the ringing cellphone.
• I want a phone that reaches a household. Many a time it really doesn’t matter whom I speak to first, but I know the location I’m calling. It used to be nice when I called my brother or sister and reached a niece or nephew answering the phone. There are also plenty of incoming calls that are just as much for my husband as for me. I wouldn’t like to have to answer them all.
• I want a phone that isn’t affected by cell tower reception. My relatives among the Green Mountains in Vermont don’t have much use for cellphones, but they’ve been connected by landline since they had a two-digit phone number and all calls went through the village’s central operator.
I also think offices and businesses are a very long way from replacing phones that reach a certain desk or location and phones that have extensions and easy transfer functions. I doubt that we’ll ever see hospitals and corporate office structures and government buildings pull out the multifunction phones that are anchored to a physical position.
I honestly believe that the current mania for devices that connect wirelessly to everything will pass. The ability to bring the Internet as well as multimedia resources into tiny boxes and pads that accompany us everywhere is a fad that we’ll have difficulty explaining to our young of a few generations from now. I don’t know what will tip the balance—maybe it will be the decrease of cheap and abundant energy, maybe it will be something political like the Snowden leaks, maybe it will be paranoia among the populace over putting everything they do and think and every move they make on record accessible to anyone, including those who do not have their best interests at heart—but I think something will make people say “This is insane and we have to stop it.” Newspaper presses will have to be rebuilt from scratch and kids will have to rediscover games without electronics behind them. I hope there will still be landlines somewhere.