Smoking (something well past its use-by date). No one is "stuck using" anything - Europe gets the same models as the rest of the Western hemisphere. Some US-made ones may take a few months to arrive in Europe and vice versa, but that's normal. For the most part people have the handsets they want.

One thing he's missing is market maturity and saturation: everyone in Europe who was going to get a phone has already bought at least two in the last couple of years (look at the table at the bottom of http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUK21701809). Device X "isn’t getting London’s cool kids hot and bothered" because they've been hot and bothered a number of times before, got disappointed by the the reality of X vs its hype and eventually became pretty blasé about such things.

Another is that smartphones are still a niche market everywhere. Most people who buy a phone want just that, a device that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and does voice calls and SMS. So of course that's what he sees most people do with their phones, that's what they're for. The network effect is also a factor - even if your brand new all singing all swinging smartphone has a twitter app, most of your friends-family-colleagues' don't (and most of them have probably never heard of twitter or care about its existence).