THE occasion of taking out my cellphone has provoked considerable mockery in the last 18 months or so.

“Zack Morris wants his phone back,” I have heard more than once, in reference to the “Saved by the Bell” preppie’s bricklike mobile (a late-model Motorola DynaTac, the first cellphone sold commercially, in 1983). For the sitcom’s run from 1989 to ’93, Zack’s early adoption was a totem of his Los Angeles affluence and his wheeling-and-dealing scampish streak.

Were Zack still prank-calling Principal Belding these days, he would surely have an upgrade over my calling-and-texting device. It’s a bulky clamshell phone selected for its military-grade ruggedness, as intimated by its name, the Samsung Convoy. It came free with my two-year contract. The only time it has Internet access is when I accidentally hit a button that launches a primitive Web browser (out of which, fearing usurious charges from Verizon, I exit immediately as if from a burning building).

Though my phone elicits stares in the soigné precincts of New York, I’m just one member of a small but hardy contingent (a convoy, if you will) of smartphone holdouts, people who seem like the ideal iPhone owner (under 40, urban, professional) but shun it and its app-friendly cousins for a low-tech “dumbphone.”