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Comment by alchemism | Hacker News Reader

I've just abandoned using a smartphone in favor of a $20 dumb Alcatel phone that can only do three things: calls, alarms, and an FM radio. It doesn't even vibrate.

I offloaded every other functional use into my tablet, in this case an iPad Pro.

The phone battery lasts for days on standby; I can drain my tablet battery without concern. I can leave the tablet at home if I want to stay light or if I want to stay focused on my activity.

I've been doing this for two weeks now, and I most likely will not change back.

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What do you do for navigation? (Thats literally the only feature keeping me with a smart phone right now).

Not OP, but can answer. What everyone used to do.

Drive around lost, unwilling to ask for directions?

Get lost and have to stop/call for directions?

Abandoning modern technology doesn't seem like the better alternative in this case.

Spend a few minutes looking at a map before the trip?

road closed. detours. insane levels of traffic you didn't anticipate. have fun.

This comment kind of reads like the lead-in to a bad infomercial. It's not that dramatic.

None of these are problems with proper planning. I usually add an hour for every three hours of driving as a buffer. It's worth noting that GPS doesn't solve this either. If there's an accident a few miles ahead of you that blocks the road you run into the same problem.

I had twice in a short time span a closed road that Google Maps did not know anything about.

It was useless, because it constantly routed me to the closed segment of the road. I had to manually select some far away point to finally get it to ignore the road almost completely, because I did not know how much of it was closed.

One was on a German side of a major highway connecting Germany and Poland. The other on Berlin's main highway. It was after midnight so it was a challenge, but it probably was a scheduled maintenance.

Got to say, that's my preferred method as a public transport user/pedestrian in London who sometimes goes to unfamiliar parts of town. A few minutes with the map beforehand and the help of a button compass (Suunto Clipper is my favourite), and I seem to get to the destination very easily when a few street names and bearings are committed to memory.

I used to get to the destination station, and would wait for the phone to get a reliable connection to download the map tiles... then the dodgy phone "compass"/magnetometer needed calibration, so wave it in a figure eight for a while, try to reconcile surroundings with arrow that keeps flipping direction, etc.

I get on much better with "south out of station, left onto X street, right onto Y street, final left onto Z street, then watch out for that building eyeballed on Google Streetview earlier".

You can even just go by street signs and general directions sometimes. I don't know if I have any paper maps any more. Plus, you know, reading maps while driving is probably as dangerous as texting.

The other day, I left home intending to go to a hospital near where I live. As I usually do, I plugged my phone into my car and tried to tell it to navigate there. But for some reason it hung while trying to contact Google to locate the address.

So I rebooted my phone, and rebooted my car, to no avail. Eventually I gave up, and based on the general knowledge that the hospital was to the south east, took one of the main roads through the city east, until I saw the first of several blue "H" signs directing me to the hospital.

My car has an electronic compass as well, if I didn't know which way was east/south.

First of all, not having a GPS does not automatically imply getting lost. People used to be able to navigate just fine most of the time before that technology was available.

And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? I've been asked many times in the olden days and never once was it an unpleasant experience.

> And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions?

The frequently terrible answers!

>And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions?

completely wasting their time. use your phone.

And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions?

Ask this 14 year old....

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/us/michigan-man-shoots-at-tee...

The last thing I want to do is be lost somewhere in the South. Yes I live in the south.

Thanks for the anecdote. Doesn't prove a thing.

If I got lost somewhere where there are no stores for miles around I would never walk up and ask for directions at someone's house or if my car broke down (https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/us/michigan-woman-shot/index....).

The "anecdote" is even in my own neighborhood, if my son invites some of his White friends (who are his guests) to hang out at our neighborhood pool. He gets asked does he belong there? Do you think I would leave him in a position to have to walk up and ask a random stranger for directions if he got lost while driving?

It was sheer luck that both the teenager didn't die and the guys own camera showed he was lying. If the boy had been killed the man would have gotten off. If the camera hadn't been there, they would have taken the word of "upstanding member of society -- a retired fireman" over the word of "just another teenage thug" and the boy would have been arrested.

Well, if my car broke down, I probably wouldn't ask for directions, either.

If I ask anyone I know “a teenager stopped at a man’s house to ask for directions and was shot. Guess the country?”, I bet the overwhelmingly majority (if not all) will say “U.S.A” without skipping a beat. I wouldn’t even need to mention the races of the people involved.

Not to detract from your experience (after all, you live there), but I doubt that situation is representative of most of the world.

>I've been asked many times in the olden days and never once was it an unpleasant experience.

I must give off some kind of approachable vibe, because I get asked for directions by strangers at least once a week.

> Get lost and have to stop/call for directions?

Why is, it in these type of questions, people always immediately go to the worst case scenario to try and prove their point? What about the average case: people again learn to plan their routes in advance, use their instincts, road signs, and if necessary, how to use a map.

You also assume you can't get lost using a GPS. All data has the potential to be stale. Maybe the route the gps took you is through a mountainous road where there is no signal. What happens when you come across an unfamiliar geographical feature and are unsure how to proceed, and now your gps cannot update your location? What if the location you are attemping to access is "net new" as in new roads? What if the location simply no longer exists and your mapping service has not been updated? In my experience, GPS is great for city driving with clear path to the sky (and >50% battery for any trip that is over an hour). Not so good in mountainous or remote locations. I imagine if we didn't rely on a computer telling us where something is, we would revert back to the default behavior of actually learning our surroundings, which has a host of other benefits that you never know would come in handy until they do.

> In my experience, GPS is great for city driving with clear path to the sky (and >50% battery for any trip that is over an hour). Not so good in mountainous or remote locations.

I use my phone's GPS in the wilderness all the time and it's an amazing help. Having a topo map where you can see exactly where you are is awesome. Even just having altitude is a big help like the other day when I was trudging up a steep forested ridge and wanted to know how many more hundreds of feet I had to go before the summit.

Of course you can live without GPS, but I just can't make any sense out of arguing that it isn't anything other than amazing. I'd give up a lot of stuff before I'd give up GPS.

This is what got me re-tethered to a smartphone after a several-months-long experiment with returning to a flip phone - for backpacking it's so, so nice to have GPS in my hand.

No in a city you buy an A to Z guide

This reminds me of some of my favorite direction stories from life. I was in Ohio. I had just intersected the Dublin-Granville road. I stopped at a gas station to ask "I know Dublin is at one end, and Granville the other, but I'm not sure which direction I need to go to reach Dublin, left or right?" I assumed a station attendant, at a shop with an address on the Dublin-Granville road, would be able to answer this. Instead he replied "Oh I don't know, I'm not from around here."

In another instance, I was working with someone in Seattle who had lived there about a decade, had a PhD (I mention only to point out they had some intelligence), and I mentioned I had to go to Tukwilla that night - maybe ten miles at most south of the Seattle city limits. She had no idea where Tukwilla was, had never been there.

So point being, whether it was pre-device based digital maps or today, most people have no idea where they are.

What we used to do completely sucked. I did field repair work back in the days before smartphones and cheap GPS navigation. Even with a good map and directions written down before leaving I would frequently miss turns due to poor street signs. Or have to drive super slow to read house numbers and business names. I'm shocked anyone would even consider going back to what we used to do.

Part of me wonders if the parent poster has an inexpensive data plan for the tablet? I'd be tempted to do something like that, actually.

Yes, exactly. A small amount of prepaid data, which does not expire.

I've done this in the past, and I would pull up the route in Maps on the tablet and then take it with me. But that doesn't handle getting lost, or last minute detours, etc.

Seems like keeping an iPad with cellular data around would be a good solution, but it starts to risk being "too good."

Nokia has dumb-ish phones which can act as wifi hotspots (e.g. the 8110 4G which runs KaiOS). So an alternative would be that + tablet, if you really need to you turn on the hotspot and can connect to the net.

I've done exactly the same move 9 months ago. Nokia 3310 and carry an ipad+data if I'm on the move for a few days.

My car has a builtin GPS. Navigation has been an issue only once when joining a friend to a restaurant on foot, believe it or not I asked my way around and found the place.

I have a prepaid metered data plan on the tablet, and I carefully whitelisted applications for cellular data use. I use navigation with offline maps when possible, and chat apps set to only push text. Most everything else runs wifi-only.

There used to be pretty cheap stand-alone GPS navigation devices (probably still are, though I haven't bothered to look.) And many cars have built in GPS navigation these days anyway.

You can also get a road atlas for the regions you'll find yourself in. That's how I learned to navigate. It works just fine the vast majority of the time and the remaining time you just pull into a gas station and ask. It's not really a big deal.

GPS doesn't need data, just use an offline maps app on the tablet. HERE is okay, Google Maps nowadays also lets you download areas to use offline, and there are multiple apps that can use OpenStreetMap data.

You must live a very boring life if you never go anywhere other than where you plan to at the beginning of the day.

I do live a boring life! And I like that way!

But that doesn't follow from what I wrote. I keep my whole country plus the neighboring one on my tablet. And airports tend to have Wifi :)

Nowadays storage is cheap. The entire North American continent extract of OSM takes less than 8GB. Buy a cheap mini-SD card and you can carry the whole world map around.

That's how things were before ubiquitous GPS and electronic maps. Lawn, off, etc.

I find it funny how I was approached several times, by people with a smartphone in one hand asking me for directions. Most of the time I don't know answer either, because I suck with street names and my German is still spotty. But I can help those people by orienting myself with a map on my own phone.

I like to use my phone to navigation. Especially public transport in Berlin, however as I start to learn routes I don't need it as much as two years ago.

Recently my wife tried to get to a place on Streetname 65A, but Google Maps showed her only Streetname 65 (without A) and it was a wrong place. I found it on OpenStreetMap - it was a building on the other side of the street. That was a lesson for me and installed Maps from F-Droid (an ad-less fork of mobile Maps.Me). It is an amazingly detailed map and offline one as well.

So even with smartphone one has to be always prepared to ask around or plan in advance, so maybe after all it's not as good as we like to think.

There is a plethora of mapping applications that have offline data. Maps.me and Gaia are two that I have on my iPhone, but a web search should turn up others.

Alternatively, one could learn to read a map. That got me across the country and back on multiple occasions back in the day, and I don't recall ever getting too lost. I'm not saying we have to go back to sextants, but to me GPS is a nice convenience, not a requirement.

I'm interested in doing something similar. Does the tablet have cell? What do do you when out and about, away from wifi, and need something? How do you carry the tablet around?

Doesn't it mean you now have two devices to carry around instead of one? I used to have one regular phone for calls, SMS, and one iPod for calendars, notes, etc. Now I have two in one in my smartphone which I find way more convenient. Charging's not an issue and if I want to stay focused I just turn it off.

I have a Nokia 130. As well as the features you list it will also play MP3 files, lasts several weeks on standby.

Been doing that for about three years. I have a Nexus 7 and a $20 Wiko. It's really a great combo.

My $125 Alcatel Windows Phone meets or exceeds the specs of all but the highest end apple/android devices, but I can literally feel the ecosystem crumbling around me

I disabled all notifications (except for phone and text) on my smartphone and enabled the power saving mode and now my battery can easily last 3 days...

You can also uninstall apps/turn off their data. A smart phone can be dumbed down.

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