I switched from an iPhone to Nokia 515 two years ago and vowed never to go back. If I wrote a blog post like this it would probably just be, "Living smartphone-free in the 2020's is like having a superpower, it's utter joy and freedom and and everyone still with a smartphone is a total sucker."
Then a couple of weeks ago I felt the social pressure and lack of a good camera so I bought an iPhone 12 mini. It was awful. I returned it 48 hours later and am now back with my beloved Nokia.
The grass really is greener this side of the fence.
I'm in Australia and I think there's a law that carriers need to keep an amount of 3G coverage. So we will likely lose 4G coverage before 3G. Regulation FTW!
My feeling is that tools should be transparent in their use, as in, when you use a hammer to hit a nail, the hammer essentially disappears. And while I think the iPhone of Steve Jobs was like this, I'm pretty sure that Apple intends the trajectory of the iPhone now to be less like a tool and more like an assistant, e.g. it should offer suggestions, preempt your actions, that it should "think for you". It makes it feel like there's a third-party (Apple/Siri) stuck in between me and other people. This feeling has probably crept up gradually enough that most people with smartphones don't notice it, but going from a dumb-phone to smartphone was like being hit with a hammer.
I just write things down on a piece of paper; or just "yolo it". It works well enough, although lack of GPS can be inconvenient at times, I find it's not a huge deal – this is how almost everyone got around up to ~10 years ago.
I never used taxi services anyway; bus services are pretty good here, and I cycle.
A bigger issue is that a lot of services are "smartphone-only", and can't be done with a regular computer; sometimes this makes sense, sometimes less so. I partly get around this by running Android emulator on my computer when I really can't avoid it, which works "well enough". This will only get worse in the future.
I dislike telling people I don't have a smartphone; people look at you like you're some sort of freak. Recently someone told me that "I do not belong in modern society" shrug. I guess it's not inaccurate, as I dislike a lot of technology and feel it makes our lives worse in many ways (in spite of working as a programmer, but that's just for the money at this point; very hypocritical, yes).
Right now I have a "true" dumb phone (or at least, as dumb as you can get), which can just call and SMS and that's it. Oh, it also has snake, of course, and curiously it also has some other games you need to "buy" for €5 or so. IIRC the EU will switch off 2G in 2024 or so, so I guess I'll have to buy a slightly less "dumb phone" by then. We'll see.
My wife and I will have to buy one soon, because it is pretty much the only way we can establish a line of communication with other parents of my young son's peers at kindergarten (he's nearing 3). Not doing so would stunt his growth on an emotional level, because we would deprive him of things like play dates and such. Not due to malice on the part of other parents, but because not having WhatsApp (here in the Netherlands) is not something other people can always grasp. We can choose who we interact with, but we can't choose my son's friends parents.
It's so incredibly silly how owning a smartphone isn't even a matter of preference any more; people just expect everyone to have one. I don't really need one, despite loving train travel and independent exploration on holidays. Paper maps work fine, preparation using a normal computer too.
Yeah, social stuff like that is an issue. I currently use Telegram to keep in touch with some friends; the big upshot of Telegram is that after registering, you can use web.telegram.org or the desktop app without having your smartphone (or in my case, emulator) powered on. There's no E2E encryption, but that's fine. WhatsApp, Signal, and most other solutions really are tied to the smartphone: web.whatsapp.com will route messages through your phone; it's really annoying; I wish they would just E2E directly from your laptop, but I guess that's too obscure of a "market" to cater too.
You can still use it with the Android Emulator though; there's a bunch of solutions for this but I just use the Android Studio one. It works, but you need to keep the emulator running and isn't especially convenient.
I feel like tying a lot of things to these proprietary platforms that are impossible to integrate with independently is essentially redoing the mistakes of the 90s and 00s that we had with Microsoft where you more or less had to have Microsoft Office or you'd have a hard time reading/editing those .doc files sent to you (eventually OpenOffice.org was kind-a okay at it, but still far from perfect).
I don't even mind non-free software as a matter of principle, I just want the freedom to use an "alternative" system like my Linux desktop or maybe some eclectic device like PinePhone or those modern PDA things or whatnot to participate in basic stuff, instead of being forced to shell out money to one of those huge tech giants with a bazillion dollars to purchase thingies I don't even like.
> […] but I guess that's too obscure of a "market" to cater too
Oh no, this is on purpose. WhatsApp, Signal, etc. want to maintain control of the clients at all costs because of user tracking and monetization. If this wasn't the case, they would allow some form of non-smartphone access. As it is they keep their API's closed and ban anyone trying to use any form of third party tools.
In the case of Meta (WhatsApp) this is about keeping their silo-suite closed. People may hate Facebook, but if they can keep these users via the popular WhatsApp, they can keep up their numbers. What Signal really wants is anyone's guess. Something to do with that shifty cryptocoin I guess.
> I just want the freedom to use an "alternative" system like my Linux desktop or maybe some eclectic device like PinePhone or those modern PDA things or whatnot […]
Maybe; I don't know. Telegram has the same incentives (and I believe they have some crypto wazamabob as well). I think it's much more likely that it's just easier for them: abuse is a serious issue and the more "closed" a platform is, the harder (not impossible, just harder) it becomes to abuse it (see: email). And not having to worry about third party integration/APIs, compatibility, documentation, etc. also makes their lives just easier.
Getting all of this to work well with E2E requires extra thought (how do you make messages available on two devices?); Telegram hasn't nailed that either. I don't especially care about this, but a lot of people do.
Essentially, there are basically no practical upshots for them, and it's just more effort.
> It's so incredibly silly how owning a smartphone isn't even a matter of preference any more; people just expect everyone to have one.
Most of society has transitioned now to just being custodians of smartphones -- moving the smartphones around, feeding the smartphones their various diet of information and imagery, tending to their demands for attention and updates etc. Surely it will be an unfamiliar experience to have just a regular person walk among them.
> It's so incredibly silly how owning a smartphone isn't even a matter of preference any more; people just expect everyone to have one. I don't really need one, despite loving train travel and independent exploration on holidays. Paper maps work fine, preparation using a normal computer too.
It's just like electricity, or having/not having a landline phone 40 years ago.
Signal is just as smartphone-tied as WhatsApp. It's actually worse, as there is no web version and the desktop app is flaky. So there is no improvement here at all in this regard.
That's what I do currently, but when some other kid's parents are organising a birthday party I can of course ask them not to use WhatsApp, but then my kid will be the kid with the parents who want to make things hard for everyone.
If this means that I have to get WhatsApp just for those things, than I can hardly refuse without making my son a social recluse.
No, you are the one parent who isn't making things hard for everyone. It's people demanding you and everyone else in society use Facebook spyware who are making things hard for everyone: not just your class, but all of the people of the world.
You don't make things better by making bad choices.
You'd be surprised how capable your brain is when you just trust it to remember directions. A couple of times when going to a place I've not been before I've drawn a little map, but you can always ask someone for directions to a specific street. It's actually a nice feeling to find your own way when there's the possibility of getting lost.
Buses and trains have their times at the stops/stations, or for less trafficked routes I just check on my computer and remember when I need to go.
Figuring out directions (driving, walking, transit) is actually quite easy in most cities. My approach is to just lump specific places into general "areas", get familiar with how to get between areas (transit/driving options) by thinking about their absolute positions and connections that exist, and then for unfamiliar places, look it up on a map before leaving.
The only thing I miss with navigation is real-time traffic. Which, all things considered, is just a "nice to have".
Our brains evolved to wayfind from landmarks (there's a part of the brain largely dedicated to it, found from studies on cab drivers). but using GPS navigation changes how you remember a journey you havent made before, and makes you much less likely to retain it. The screen will show you as the centred object, and your map and reference points shift on the screen relative to you.
With say analog map navigation, your position moves (you trace with your finger/update it mentally) relative to fixed landmarks on the map, so you get a better sense of their spatial relation to one another.
A lot of camera capabilities hinge on the physical size of the sensor, i.e. how much power it consumes to shoot and how much heat it generates. An iPhone camera sensor is tiny and so can do pretty amazing things like shoot 1080p 240fps slow-motion. Trying to do that with a 4/3" sensor is more demanding. I need slow-motion for my work.
As the author points out, buying a simple a android phone and disabling most of the "smartness" is a much better option.
This is what I did and it works surprising well. I still have a decent camera and can use my banking app etc.
You could say that I actually have a pretty decent phone I just disciplined myself to use it as little as possible.
Edit: the part I am really missing is the compactness of a dumb phone. Years back I had a tiny Xperia Mini and liked the size of it. I would love to see a successor at around $300-350.
> I just disciplined myself to use it as little as possible.
By now, I have no illusions of being able to discipline myself to that extent. Even with many time-sucking apps uninstalled, there's always a fast browser on the smartphone, and it's a big temptation by itself.
I think it’s perfectly healthy to use it all the time as long as you don’t sit there doom scrolling on instagram. It’s not what it is but what you use it for.
This morning I’ve had mine in my hand since I woke up. I’ve done my schedule for the day, worked out a food and exercise plan, organised an evening out with my friends, done my finances, edited a couple of photos and given my daughter delivery estimate for her new iPad. It’s just gone 08:05 so I’ve got half an hour to shitpost on HN :)
How a shovelphone is better? The author mentions 5 days is great battery life. My old dumbphone with halfdead battery has 5 days life, and it's short, used to be 15 days or so.
I don't know how things are these days but when I was doing the digital nomad thing I had an old android with my home SIM in it in order to accept calls if anything important came in, and just by disabling data and wifi it would last a week on standby. Smartphones have huge batteries that they waste on keeping always-on TCP connections going. Remove those and it should last forever
I too tried to ditch my smartphone, buying one of the re-released Nokias.
The experiment was DOA, since there was no way of transferring my contacts from the iPhone to the Nokia. Furthermore, Sweden runs on BankID (an electronic id service) and it wasn’t available for the Nokia.
What did work on the other hand, was buying an Apple Watch with cellular. Now my phone is often in my bag/car/house and I’m still reachable via the Apple Watch, but have no way of doom scrolling.
Correct me if I’m wrong but you can do BankID with a chip and pin device from the major banks?
When I first got BankID it was not tied to my phone and it was a lot of hassle to figure out how to make that the case with Handelsbanken (my bank at the time).
Much easier with Nordea, nordea having greater English support (though not amazing) and a much better web interface (bordering amazing when compared with Handelsbanken).
> Correct me if I’m wrong but you can do BankID with a chip and pin device from the major banks?
You’re right, but there’s no way I’m lugging an additional widget everywhere I go.
Now, the Apple Watch doesn’t have it either (yet) but it’s a good enough compromise where I can take a walk or run an errand without needing to take my phone with me.
I use it mostly to sign contracts, view kivra (IE; check payslips and official mail from companies), sign automatic payments and check my bank account.
I don’t need to do those things on the go, but maybe I’m missing something, since currently I have an iPhone with BankID and I could be forgetting a time when I use it.
My local shop is an AutoMat[1] that requires you to BankID with a QR code before the doors will open. I’m realistically not going to take my laptop, a personal hotspot, and my BankID card machine there to get in.
You can always do what I do. Delete 90% of the pre-installed apps from a Smartphone and disable most notifications. Then be really really discerning about what you then install to that base from its App Store. Effectively turning a smartphone into a dum phone/feature phone.
If you use a social network long enough it really becomes extremely hard to do.
I honestly find it harder to quit all social networks than quit some drugs.
I uninstall/reinstalled the same social networks sometime multiples times a day, I often closed a social network webpage only to instinctively retype the url seconds later.
The only thing that kinda works for me is software that block all social medias.
I suggest you read "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.".
I've found long term success in getting off of Facebook (never used Twitter) using the following steps (I still visit Insta most days on the native app however):
* Got rid of the native apps (except for Messenger Lite) years ago
* Switched to mbasic.facebook.com in the browser
* Recently I logged out of said mobile site
Now every time my muscle memory goes to facebook.com it asks me to login and I close the tab. I don't miss it at all and have no urge to login once I see the login form. I think I may have finally quashed my FB addiction!
Personally I dislike – even resent – having to own a device I don't like, that I don't control (not without extensive hackery, which I don't have the interest or time for), and where I have to create accounts and accept various EULAs I don't like to use basic functionality.
Of course, you can go the Replicant/PostmarketOS/etc. or Purism/PinePhone or whatnot route, but then you're missing out on so many things and/or have to spend so much time on things (not worth it for me) that you might as well not get a smartphone. A smartphone is greatly reduces in value if your banking app and $popular_messenger_app doesn't work. And besides, it only solves part of the problem: I still have a device too large to comfortably use, in spite of being quite tall with big hands.
It's hard to resist. It's like being on a diet/fasting but having your cabinets stocked with all unhealthy food or a drug abuser with free drugs they can't have.
Self-control and discipline also take a lot of mental energy out of some people.
If you set yourself up not to need to exert this discipline, like in your example of keeping junk food out of the house, that's a burden off your mind.
That's mental energy you can use for other things.
(This simple analogy of requiring exhaustible mental resources for discipline doesn't necessarily apply to everyone. But there are some people it does apply to.)
As others have mentioned, this is not really a dumb phone. Sure it puts some more _friction_ into using modern Internet connected services, but you can still basically do everything a modern phone can do (it has a full modern browser). Heck you even get the modern experience of ads everywhere despite the limited screen and memory (the ads are all modal pages)!
In fact, much of the review centers around "smart" features -- things you'd probably need an Internet connection for -- rather than phone features.
For reference, here's a video that shows how KaiOS works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFMu6a7jL54 . I'd say that's pretty smart for a phone! Low resolution non-touch screen, sure. But it has modern website support in case you need it + plenty of communication and SNS apps...
If anything, I'd guess most people are more comfortable ditching the "phone" part of a smartphone (no calls or SMS support) so long as it has Internet. Limiting yourself to no more than WAP-level Internet support (no CSS or JS support at all)? That's the true dumb phone experience.
You can do some things but I wouldn't stretch it and say you can "basically do everything a modern phone can do" because in my country I can't use it to identify myself, I can't do banking on it, I can't ride the bus, buy tickets for trains, make payments and a lot of other very essential things that are now in our smartphones.
I can't do most of these things even on a smartphone in the US!...
- identify myself: The state I'm in has not rolled out any support for electronic IDs so short of "taking a photo of a DL (which the Nokia also would allow for) and hoping for the best", I can't do this with a smartphone either.
- ride the bus, buy tickets for trains: Ditto for transit. No phone-compatible NFC integration at all means I still need a good old fashioned transit card. Train tickets can be bought digitally via the browser, which probably doesn't count (and the Nokia could also do this).
Also:
- banking: While there are dedicated apps, I don't see how the Nokia would prevent you from doing this via the bank's website or over the phone. Banking apps are not particularly more secure than the website and usually don't offer anything beyond what is available there.
So really a lot of the features mentioned are not that commonly available even for smartphones!
Yes but the US is a poor backwards country compared to some. No offence, that's just how it seems to many of us.
And then of course there are those who'd say the US is doing it right because we're so cashless that people are protesting against this new way of life.
I personally don't care. I think if we ever get to a point when an authoritarian rule is threatening our liberties then cash, traceable train tickets and pet store purchases are the least of our troubles.
My point really is just that as a matter of reality there are plenty of people who don't expect these features out of even smartphones, let alone non-smart phones. Unlike things such as "loading a page with JS/CSS", "playing video" or "having a camera" which I doubt you'd find anyone disagreeing are basic features of smartphones.
There's also nothing inherently preventing these features from being implemented in a basic phone like in the article, technologically speaking. The features aren't supported because the market to support them is too small or nonexistent.
As one point of reference: Because NFC support is spotty on phones, subway systems in many Chinese cities allow scanning a QR code to pay fares by phone. There's no reason this could not be implemented as an app on this "feature" phone. It's not there because the places this phone is sold don't have a market for this feature.
Authoritarian rule doesnt persist via tanks and stormtroopers knocking on your door, it persist by leveraging minor daily convenience, necessities, which mold compliance. Social credit system.
If you cant take the bus to work, if you are denied healthcare because of xyz, if you are denied access to credit, or the grocery store, etc.in a cashless economy.. then most people are controlled without any violence.
This is one of the main reasons many are against an increase of centrally managed services such as universal state healthcare, ubi, etc.. because once they control exclusively a necessity in your life, they can leverage it to ram anything they want or deny you sevices. Freedom lies in choice.
No way, feature phones don't run stuff like WhatsApp and YouTube. A typical example is Motorola RAZR (2004 version). The author has a smartphone with a numpad instead of a touchscreen.
A phone that can run apps doesn't count as a dumbphone on my book. Do I use the term differently than most people? When I think of dumb phone, I think of the StarTAC, probably because it was my first. The RAZR was dumb, too, in my mind. A modern example for me is the Punkt MP02. It runs Android, technically, but you wouldn't know it, because you can dobmuch with it but, you know, use it as a phone. That's dumb to me, a phone that is a mostly just a phone.
The RAZR could run J2ME apps though. At the time there were J2ME Facebook, Twitter, Opera Mini web browser, Google Maps (with street view), tons of games, etc.
When the original iPhone came out and didn’t support apps I (unsuccessfully) argued that that meant it wasn’t a smartphone, and it was even less smart than most dumb phones on the market.
At the time I used Sony Ericsson dumbphones, and they had very rich J2ME support - you could set Java apps as a live wallpaper (which iPhone still doesn't allow), multitask (which took years to get to the iPhone) and all this on very very modest (single-digit MB RAM) dumbphone hardware.
But in this case you can. KaiOS actually has quite the plethora of apps available and because it has a modern browser engine, you can run modern web apps mostly with no problems (besides the limited resolution / memory).
Just a tip -- I use my apple watch and leave my phone at home. I can listen to podcasts and music, call and read emails and texts, use maps and the fitness app. I save up all my emails and texts for when I'm sitting down and with my ipad. Turns out, when I'm with friends or my girlfriend or commuting i don't need a phone. And when I'm at work or home or in a cafe I have my ipad or computer.
It's not for everyone, just saying there exists devices between dumb and smart phone for those of us who wants to tune out a little bit.
Edit: Re battery, I’d say 12 hours. If i use it a whole lot, which i rarely do, i’d say 6 hours. Whenever i come home, i put it on the charger by the door, next to my keys.
How does train tickets work? I’m in europe, and havn’t really looked into it… do you “share” the tickets to the wallet app? You have a “train” app on your watch? Just show a qr code in an email? Been wanting to set this up for a while…
I'm in the UK and I use the TrainLine app - it allows you to add tickets to Apple Wallet (and there's a watch app as well). Then you just scan the QR code on your watch at the ticket barrier.
Life is too short to waste distracted by a smartphone. I prefer to use a the large screen and keyboard of a laptop for communication. I am still using a 2G phone with a B&W display for emergencies, for example if I get lost or held up meeting friends. Even then I'll have discussed a contingency with them - the old-fashioned way. I pay next to nothing to keep the account open, and the tap-texting naturally limits my desire to use it for more. Rue the day that GSM is shut down. I also have some text alerts set up from a script running at home to let me know about urgent things.
I have tried them, iPhones are elegant, but I still don't need a golden ball and chain. In most cases, I can use the applications I need on the web, like my bank. I figure out destinations beforehand, writing things down, print directions out, or buy a paper map for a holiday. Lyft has a site called https://ride.lyft.com/ which lets you call a car on a normal browser. Open to using a car service or public transit. I would prefer not to have the burden of carrying a smartphone around with me. Once I took a month-long road trip with a friend. My camera broke, so all I have are journal entries written on hotel notepads. Best time of my life.
Happy to. It requires being willing to change anything in your life to make the whole thing better. That is frightening. A smartphone and social media can end up being a kind of security blanket, it gives you a cheap dopamine hit, so remind yourself that cowboys did without not long ago. Religious Jews still give it up for a day and a night every week, getting together to eat and talk face to face, and maybe play a board game. It means being willing to reorient yourself so that you have a different circle of friends. That does not mean that you are giving up on your current ones! You might try different things and find that you find meaning in boxing, doing something physical in your neighborhood, or making a craft or music. When you set boundaries up front - "hey, I won't be using Insta, but we can still make plans by phone/email, rehearse, play these gigs, and post our recordings to Bandcamp" - you will discover who is good enough to allow into your life, because they respect your time by keeping appointments.
I grew up with SM my whole life. I discovered that in a way became my safe space. Meaning that when i want to procrastinate because i fear doing something ( fear failure. Like right now that i want to study for my exams) i turn to that. When i close the tabs i feel a sense of what i will do now and i major FOMO. Maybe i built up an behavioral addiction. I don't question browsing on fb, twitter, hn but i question why i want to read this book and if it's pointless.
Personally I use an app/domain blocker on my android phone, and I block social networks from /etc/hosts on my laptop, I also use the command "chattr +i /etc/hosts" to make it harder to unblock the social networks I blocked.
Now the only social network I still use is Linkedin.
But I also "waste" my time on other stuff now, so I don't know if it's better, the brain always find new ways to procrastinate I guess.
I tried moving to a proper dumb phone, a Nokia 105, a few years back. I found out that it’s a massive social disadvantage, very isolating and means you have to carry more crap around all the time and keep more context in your head. It’s ten times more difficult to adapt to changes without information at hand. Experiment ended after three months and I’m glad it did.
I get the ideological thing here but realistically smart phones are a really really good bit of tech and I adore mine.
Ouch. I do have smartphone but do not have data plan. Use it strictly as a phone, camera and offline GPS. It has close to zero social value to me. If I want to socialize I either talk to my friends on Skype from my PC or just visiting in person.
That's the point. I call it "knowing what you need to be in control of your life".
> It's ten times more difficult to adapt to changes without information at hand.
I understand - for me, the argument goes that if I find myself needing to frantically google something, then I'm already on the wrong path. I accept this means that some lifestyles are not possible. Personally, I prefer it.
The issue is your mind is a terrible place to keep context because it’s unreliable and untrustworthy. Things get in the wrong order, warp into different things and sometimes even completely disappear. Any level of complexity to handle and you need to offload some of the load somewhere else lest you screw up. I’m known to be incredibly reliable and organised and that’s only because of the knowledge of above.
It’s not about frantically googling stuff. Last weekend the trains here went to hell here in the UK and the information at hand by the staff on how to get home was completely wrong. I managed to source information from elsewhere and that made the difference between me getting home at 21:00 or 23:30. Similarly when plan A fails (oh crap the restaurant we were going to is gone) then you can adapt to a plan B quickly with a good outcome.
I also switched to a Nokia 230 ~2 years ago, first just as an experiment, haven't gone back so far.
I tried a KaiOS based phone also in that time, but that was so unbelievably unstable that I ditched it after using it for two weeks or so.
I still have a smartphone powered off in a drawer, that I pick whenever I need that (~once a month, for banking stuff, using Google Maps to drive to another city, etc). I have Telegram running on my laptop and a few other things like the app for my mowing robot.
In general, also at work, I like to mute all notifications if I need to focus, heavy Pomodoro user, too.
There are not that many downsides for me. Sometimes someone asks me to send a phone number to them, which is only possible via Bluetooth. So I need to write the number down on a piece of paper, type it back into an SMS and send it. What a waste of time - I first thought. But in reality, that dump phone saves much more time, than these little pieces of manual effort cause, so in the end, I still have more free time. I was surprised at how often I do things that I don't need to do that often, e.g. checking my bank account balance.
My approach on this problem was first to use the dedicated Apple's solution, that is the time management control panel.
Spoiler, that never worked as I would turn on and off the constraints based on my needs. I was consistently unsatisfied and endlessly blaming my lack of will. Thus, I really understand the point of view of the author to readily constraint himself with the hardware instead of software knobs easy to turn off.
Rather of buying a new phone, it worked for me to just live with my iPhone 6 until today. It became so slow that it achieves pretty much the same behavioral perks but still supports a wider range of useful features imho like keeping my Spotify account usable on my commute.
Opposidely, my reddit addiction -- and news sites in general -- completely disappeared as the website now takes seconds to load and the panel advocating to download the app takes up half the screen making it just unusable.
What I do us use the time management feature with parental controls, so that I can't disable it. When I make the passcode I write it down and seal it in an envelope. I scramble my memory by saying random numbers so I can forget the passcode (though I probably would not be able to remember it anyway).
This is not a "dumbphone"; those don't exist anymore now that the 3G networks have been turned off.
This "dumb" phone has an entire main-CPU OS, a web browser (!), and then another entire OS on the modem chip (which, of course, runs code which you have absolutely no influence over).
I had several life-changing events occur early 2021, which led to me not using any telephone services, whatsoever (until late 2021). Instead, I purchased a one-way pager (Pagers Direct) on a two-year contract, for <$9/month.
When I tell people to "page me," I get one of two responses:
A) "What does that mean?!" (typically younger folks, less than thirty), or
B) [Initial Disbelief] "They still make those?!" (typically older folks, above forty)
I absolutely love it; of course this affects my social life... except that I run with an extremely small crowd, in a particularly small subset of my mid-sized US town.
I now have access to my cell phone, but it never leaves my house (used essentially as a landline, because it costs less than a local landline); I will BLOCK my Caller ID when making phone calls to anybody (outside a few trusted contacts), and I never hand out my new cell phone number (and disabled my decades-used phone#).
To each his own — I am mid-30s, and used to be 1337 ... never really understood cell phone culture, and am happily marching to my own beat!
I'd buy a Nokia 3210 if the _ONLY_ upgrades were:
1. (even) better battery, 2. (even) less power consumption, 3. (even) better signal reception and (4) support for modern phone providers (so I can actually make calls and send texts with it no matter where I am).
I don't want a new display, case, operating system software or anything else, and that's why the 3310 falls short.
I thought it was funny how the author explained typing text messages and also T9, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_%28predictive_text
Then again I realised that many younger people might had never have heard of them. Time flies.
> If you are looking to keep your smartphone life, don’t get this phone, or any dumb phone for that matter. Instead, get a budget Android device.
This is exactly what I did after trying a dumb phone. I have to say asisd from all the diversions, smarthpones do bring very nice features. I just wouldnt want to miss E-Banking, 2FA for some of my apps and so on.
This is why I bought a Wiko Y81 for 60$ and I continue to love this phone. It is so painfully slow that it truly allowed me to get my social media habbits off. However while being slow it is still a solid phone, reading, listening to spotify and doing emergency stuff (like retrieving a lost boarding card from google drive) works fine.
What's even better is due to its weak screen the battery lasts forever! It's so refreshing to just leave the house with 15% battery for the day and still getting through.
I used one of the variants of the Nokia 100s model for 3 years. (2017 - 2020). After using these dumb phones my habit changed and I don't exclusively rely on my phone anymore. Even though I have a smartphone now, it is practically useless when I am _inside_ my room. I use my phone to just communicate and occasionally read PDFs. It doesn't have any social media apps, so the worst I do is browse the web once in a while.
But one huge advantage smartphone has is the camera and the maps. These are really the killer feature for a smartphone. Everything else is a bonus!
The bonus includes mobile banking, receiving important emails, and so on!
Life is simple when you throw away the cancer apps from smartphones. Then proceed to use it as it should be used i.e. just a phone!
The particular Nokia device mentioned in this article is now a little out of date. It will not receive any new updates. The Google service might even stop working on it (depending on where you live). The author will soon be quite upset. The next version of KaiOS is on the way, sans Google services, but with baked in FB and Twitter.
For the gadget tweakers, this device can be "hacked" a little and have alternative apps loaded (and bloatware removed) so that is a plus. Its sister device, the Nokia 800 Tough, is also tweakable and can be set up so the batter lasts 4 to 5 days (getting rid of all bloatware and making it an SMS/Telephone will do that to most phones though).
> Apps including WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, as well as others that you can install from KaiOS Store.
> Google Assistant. It’s not deeply integrated with the device (more on this below) but it can still be useful for voice text entry and quick Google lookups.
> Ability to sync your email, contacts and calendar, or simply import your contacts from a third-party service.
I too am using a Nokia KaiOS phone (8110 in my case) from time to time.
Two flaws of the device that I think would make it hard to use as a primary are the short battery life (far from the fabled 10 day charge of yore) and the short key travel distance that makes it very easy to do multiple presses by mistake. The second thing is particularly annoying when entering your PIN (if you decide to use one).
I decided to uninstall all social media apps and even the browser from my phone. It's working great. Sometimes I really need the browser and I temporarily reinstall it. But it's awesome not to have this constant distraction in my pocket, and I can still use whatsapp and listen to podcasts in my commute without any doomscrolling. I also have the wikipedia app.
I did the same thing and switched to a Nokia Flip. So far, my experience is the same. But my actual goal is the Mudita Pure [1], which is supposed to arrive soon-ish.
Knew immediately it was the 2720. It's all around a fantastic phone. The wifi tethering helps also if you carry around a laptop and spotify/whatsapp/google maps built in is also great.
Imagine a 3g, pre 4g phone. Basically that's what it is.
I switched to a real dumb phone (Nokia 105) as part of a lockdown project to re-focus my life and reduce my personal dependence on technology (which I strongly believe mostly gets in the way of being an effectual and productive human). One of the best choices I ever made.
The only way I ever ditched my smartphone as a daily driver for any long period of time was by using an Apple Watch instead. All the communication and notifications I need, without the distractions of unlimited possibilities on a smartphone.
If you're talking about things like TOTP token apps, I'd expect there to be a possibility to do that.
The protocol isn't that complex, so worst case you can write your own. (I've ported the TOTP protocol to get a 6 digit nixie clock to generate my tokens, lol)
The more fancy ones that pop up a message (like in iOS or with Google Play Services) probably won't be supported.
For some reason, when the KaiAuth developer tried to submit it into the KaiOS app store, KaiOStech rejected it because it doesn't "match the use case for majority of our users".
It's called a feature phone, produced by HMD Global not Nokia, also KaiOS is crap and too unstable for regular use even compared with Android version 2
Then a couple of weeks ago I felt the social pressure and lack of a good camera so I bought an iPhone 12 mini. It was awful. I returned it 48 hours later and am now back with my beloved Nokia.
The grass really is greener this side of the fence.