One of the issues that has come up with smart phones is price, a lot of people would say that the cost is too high. While there is some truth to this the real issue is not the cost of the phones themselves but of the data plans that are necessary to use them. It is likely that using your smart phone will get much more expensive in the future than it is now.
It is hard to say what the cost of smart phone should be; most people will always want them to cost less. In reality the price is probably about where it should be, they are priced pretty close to what you would pay for a laptop and they have similar capabilities. There is also a pretty big difference in the cost of smart phones to reflect the different features that they offer. The huge competition between makers has probably resulted in smart phones being priced at about the right level.
Where things get more complicated with the price of smart phones is when it comes to the data plan. In these cases almost everybody will agree that they are too expensive. The problem with most data plans is that they only allow for a limited amount of data each month. This is true even of the so called unlimited data plans, they will discontinue your service if you go over by too much. The result is that smart phones are somewhat limited by the fact that people have to be careful about how much data they transfer every month.
It would be nice to think that as smart phones become more commonplace the price of data plans will go down but this is unlikely. If history has taught us anything it is that the carriers will find new ways to make money and they will come up with all sorts of creative ways to charge you more. Really the only thing that is stopping them from doing it now is the fact that smart phones are only just starting to become widely used. You can be sure that when the majority of people are using smart phones the prices will go up.
Given that smart phones are not likely to get any cheaper in the future it does raise the question of what kind of future they have. Clearly the wireless providers have a vested interest in getting people to use smart phones rather than computers as their main way of communicating. They have already proved that they can charge substantially more than they can for a regular internet connection. The result is that it is very likely that they will find ways to make people more and more dependent on their smart phones so that they can charge them more to use them.