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Comment by vmorgulis | Hacker News Reader

Phone is more a way of socialization than a useful tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement

The real tool is in the access to the human knowledge with Wikipedia but people don't do that too much. They play games and send textos.

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My spouse has an antique Nokia almost-brick running Opera and can use Wikipedia. It's wonderful. He doesn't have any of the distractions of Facebook, but he can check the difference between naltrexone and naloxone or brush up on Dvorak's family history whenever those come up in an argument!

Is it the N900?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

I've seen people with it because it can run Debian.

It's not -- I will go check the model number. There are about 12 I saw that looked almost the same when I tried to find the model number online.

Ohh, that brings back memories. The one I had was the N800 though (but I really missed the keyboard of the N800).

This was my reaction exactly. On the one hand, I'm sick to death of modern phones that can't hold a charge, keep crashing apps, and get super hot after just a few minutes. On the other, a dumb phone seems too excessive a reaction. I mostly don't use my phone to make calls. I use it to read. There's something to be said for a phone that has a nice touch screen but doesn't provide a browser, just a few basic apps for reading and taking notes.

A few months ago[1] I was day-dreaming on HN about an alternative to html designed from the ground up to minimize webpage bloat and avoid tracking. Now I have a further refinement in mind: build a device that has exemplary reliability and power-utilization with a big touch screen and a cellphone number. Build a bare-bones browser for it supporting a tiny subset of html (no images, so no pixel tracking). Have the new device proxy through an ISP server that also as a bonus filters out ads and third-party cookies. Gradually encourage people to build hobbyist or paywalled reading experiences out of the subset of html and fork off a new world wide web. Then win :) Or something. Who's with me?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10496611

A potential solution: Before I got a true smartphone I had a Nokia E71. It had an OK browser, 3G and you could even tether via Bluetooth. As it was Symbian/S60 there were some apps like Google Maps, but switching apps was a pretty painful / slow process so you didn't want to do it often. The battery lasted about 3 days even with regular usage.

Do you know Gopher (the protocol)?

It's just a tree of directories and files. Files can be text like markdown, images or videos. I think it's enough for a lot of use cases.

Not a bad idea. That's actually the second time somebody's mentioned Gopher to me this week. (Was it you the first time? :) But yeah, if we're going for retro, why not go deeper.

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