Most people rarely use their smartphones for actual phone calls

A quarter of those in developed countries won’t make a single phone call in any given week this year. But unlike this Silicon Valley CEO, it’s not that they don’t have a phone. No, these so-called “data exclusives” have just found ways to do nearly all their communication without having to suffer talking to a fellow human, according to Deloitte, which forecast the level of radio silence as part of its annual tech predictions. “Phone conversations with friends and family, for example, have been supplanted to an extent by social networks,” Craig Wigginton, head of Deloitte’s U.S. telecom practice, told Re/code. “An app can replace the calls we would have formerly made to order takeout, request a taxi, book an appointment or make a bank transfer.” And we are more dependent than ever on our smartphones, Deloitte says, noting that 40 percent of us check our phones within five minutes of getting up and a third of people do so just before bed.