Any evidence for this claim?
I thought the same when I read it the first time. I just played along because I'm going to keep my flip phone and hopefully any replacements for the rest of my life. Smart phones are just too big to carry. I don't need to apologize or cite a conspiracy theory for making that choice. I already waste some time getting on this desktop computer, I don't need another device to enable more.
No doubt I would have one at work if I wasn't retired. The scheduling and reminding would work better than a small planner that I used to carry on the job. I also did all my activity logging by pencil and paper in that planner. A smart phone is smaller than the small sized planner. I could have typed my logs into the smart phone, then downloaded them onto my computer in the office. Sometimes I had court cases where my logs were sent to plaintiffs in civil cases and to defendants in criminal cases and it would be easier to do that electronically than to have them scanned. I no longer have to live in a fishbowl and have my work activities intensely scrutinized at times, thank goodness, 2 1/2 decades of that is enough for one person!
I think one of the most frequent calls I got on the radio was "Rec 21, Mammoth, are you near a phone!" At least half the time I wasn't close at all, not within several miles. I resisted getting a cell phone at work because I didn't want people in offices to call me all the time and I could concentrate on field duties.
I can say, getting back on topic, that having scanners often saved a great deal of time and increased effectiveness when I was working. I guess I could call the Midland mobile I had in my truck a scanner as well. Sometimes I would hear calls over the sheriff's net that I was much closer to than any of their deputies. In one case during the spring runoff after a big winter I had just filled up with gas in town and ready to go in quarters when a call came in about a missing toddler in the area of a swollen creek that was running fast and very deep. I was there before anyone. The mother was hysterical. I was able to get the incident size up and being the hasty search 10 minutes before a county deputy arrived on scene. Sheriff's deputies and I started to coordinate how the hasty search would go, who would be IC, etc., by talking on my BK handheld on the sheriff's net. They had a description of the young boy, the name and description of the parents and everything they needed to take over the incident. A miracle occurred when my hasty search found an off duty USFS wilderness ranger and her boyfriend hiking down the creek banks, who found the toddler standing in a still part of the stream, pointing at some bush on the other side and starting to walk toward the rapids to reach it. We all walked down to the mother with the little boy in the ranger's arms, where the first deputy had just arrived. Talk about an emotional reaction by the parents! It so nice to win one now and again, instead of telling the dispatcher that we had an 11-44.