My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

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.

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.

Please make it happen Sony

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.

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.

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.

seriously?

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.

I get the ideological thing here but realistically smart phones are a really really good bit of tech and I adore mine.

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.

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.

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 miss dumbphones.

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 don't want a new display, case, operating system software or anything else, and that's why the 3310 falls short.

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.

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!

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).

> 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.

What makes this a "dumb phone" then?

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).

[1] https://mudita.com/products/phones/mudita-pure/

Imagine a 3g, pre 4g phone. Basically that's what it is.

they're just hard to find for a good reason. :)

If it was anything like my old Nokia dumb phone days.