I'd hesitate to pin it down to any particular feature set, but the following two features have been very useful to me:

Date-based alarm scheduling - I don't want a feature-heavy calendar application running on my phone, so this has been useful.

Custom text for alarms - Useful for gym reminders; I can plan exercises for each day in advance, rather than deciding what to do in advance. (Again, I stay away from feature-heavy applications. I like lightweight.)

Day-based alarms, and multiple alarms, while trivial features on most smartphone alarm apps, are in fact quite useful, and weren't present in my pre-smartphone phones. I have two alarms set for waking up, for example; the first tells me to down an energy drink (Xenadrine drink mix, supposedly for dieting but my favorite energy drink, or Redline energy drinks, are both awesome for this) or extra-large cup of coffee. Thirty minutes later, when the second alarm wakes me up, I wake up easily and without grogginess. (Alternatively, you can use an alarm application that wakes you up in the ideal part of your sleep cycle. That's a bit... feature-rich for me, however.)

My main objection to smartphone use is that by putting anything you want to pay attention to at your fingertips, it can introduce a certain distance from what is actually going on. I would not advocate, say, spending your 4 hours at the DMV observing your surroundings (that would be a waste of time). But I am concerned that time spent with portable Internet corresponds to ever thicker-walled and less-apparent echo chambers. Is this an issue you have thoughts on?

By way of example, I'm trying to think about the difference between reading a novel on the subway and reading the internets on the subway; the main distinction is that when I'm reading the novel, I'm aware that I'm not actually paying attention to my surroundings.

This is an unfair comparison, especially in light of the explanation given in the edit.

OP's point was that GPS can frequently be unreliable. In terms of navigating without it, basic orientation is typically enough to get you started, and "smart" substitutes for a compass are strictly inferior to an actual compass.

Related: buy a small and reliable compass. Not a compass app for your phone, but an actual compass. GPS, your own spatial awareness, and reasonable assumptions about geography can all let you down, but north is always north.

Edit: I will now ruin the punchiness of this comment with an explanatory edit. I do a lot of walking around a large city. Google Maps is fairly reliable but leaves much to be desired. Establishing GPS location, battery consumption and occasional out-and-out wrongness are common bugbears, so I started trying to navigate without it.

The biggest problem I found was orienting myself. Surfacing from a subway stop only to have no idea which direction was which, I'd sometimes fall back to GPS just to check what direction I was facing (which Google Maps is really bad at anyway. Anyone who's ever done that "let's walk ten metres in this direction to see what way I'm pointing" thing will know what I mean. I played around with some compass apps, which are just as much of a pain as Google Maps. Eventually I just gave in and bought a compass.

Nono, I mean they describe their nice behavior as super-nice, while the other person describes it as ok/slightly defensive? I'm still inclined to think people don't realize that their own defensiveness is showing when they think it isn't. Also, I think I wouldn't expect someone to be especially accommodating for a crazy loon.

But they're writing down their own behavior wrong. They say that they said, "How can I help you make this evening better?" and the person reports that they said something like "Look, can we make this evening better?!" So that's not just about causation, it's attributing actions to themselves.

Are they dimmable or multiway? Does the dimmer switch control the number of diodes illuminated?

The reason for favouring one side of those cases is obvious. If it wasn't, he wouldn't have used them. However, the fail to support his point, because "offence" supports both sides of each of his cases.

We live in a world where people disregard qualifiers, so if you say "on tests of mathematical ability, men have higher variance in test scores, so the most talented mathematicians are disproportionately men" people will hear "men are better at math" and assume that average men are better than average women at math (this might also be true, but is not what you said).

I could make similar argument about a lot of things we do here, e.g., people hear "consequentialism" and think "the ends justify the means", that doesn't stop LW from promoting consequentialism.

So as a general rule, we pretend that there are no between-group differences because if we don't, people have a tendency to focus exclusively on between group differences and ignore within-group differences, which is worse.

Intentionally believing false things always carries a cost.

For example, suppose I want to hire the best mathematicians for a project, they'll likely be disproportionately White or Asian men. Someone who followed your advise looking at the mathematicians I hire would conclude that I was racist and sexist in my hiring and we live in a society where the courts might very well back them. Thus the only way for me to avoid being considered a racist and sexist is to intentionally fudge the numbers based on race and sex, which itself requires that I know the truth about racial and gender differences so I know which way to fudge.

When someone says something offensive to you - they're racist, homophobic, sexist

Taboo, "racist, homophobic, sexist". In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean "you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don't like".

For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders? Does it become racist/sexist if one attempts to speculate on the cause of these differences?