Checking the time on a smartphone is another one of those actions that puts a smartphone in your hand. To untrain this impulse, Whetstone will never give you the time of day.

Arguably trading apps for physical wristwatches and alarm clocks is a prime example of The Unix Philosophy.

Twenty-six years ago, two technologists envisioned a different kind of future: one where humans and quiet, unobtrusive computers comfortably co-existed.

In their prophetic 1996 essay The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Marc Weiser and John Seely Brown spoke of a time when tiny, Internet-enabled computers would be embedded in everything from clocks, to toys, to microwave ovens. When such a time came, they advised, the design patterns of the Mainframe and Personal Computing eras would no longer serve us; instead, Ubiquitous Computing would require us to "radically rethink the goals, context, and technology of the computer and all the other technology crowding into our lives."

This is huge, a total paradigm shift, really forcing me to rethink what a phone is and could be. Thanks, OP.