As little as possible. I only got a cellphone originally out of necessity, and I seldom used it. When we moved to Nova Scotia, I figured I ought to get a local area code, so I went to the company office to do that. They informed me that it didn't have enough Gs and that the old towers that it could talk to were being decommissioned the next week.
Whether that was true or not, he talked me into getting a new one. Still a flip phone, but one that wasn't obsolete.
I was fine with that for years until our landline went out for a month. The phone company was in no hurry to fix it because everyone has cell phones, right? I mean who even uses landlines any more? Well, we were in an area with zero cell phone coverage. It was a landline or nothing, so for a month, we had nothing. If we'd had an emergency, I would have had to drive three kilometres to a secret spot I discovered where I could ping a cell tower across the bay in New Brunswick.
Since that was unacceptable, I decided to upgrade to a phone that could make calls via wifi. So now I have a modern-looking flat cellphone. Sure I can do some nifty things with it, like the Merlin bird identification app (apparently everything it hears is a red-eyed vireo!), and it is handy having a camera in my purse all the time. But it takes so long to boot up that I keep it on all the time. Which means that I have to silence it in theatres. But it makes annoying notification beeps even when I have told it to shut the heck up.
My point is that I have it only out of necessity. I agree that it is prudent to carry it for emergencies, but I hate it. I give it the bare minimum of my time and money. I am certainly not about to upgrade until forced to.
