Dumb phones are on the rise in the U.S. as Gen Z looks to limit screen time
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I dropped a comment there where I said that while I spent hours researching the "perfect dumb phone", there's certain features that are nearly exclusive to a smartphone or just plain work better on a smartphone, including having a decent camera and GPS/map with me at all times.
IMO, I think it's easier to simply dumb down your existing smartphone by stripping it of all apps except for just the bare essentials. For example, my phone only handles calls, SMS, maps, camera, books, etc. No web browser, social media, fancy messaging app, or even an app store. Though this may change sometimes and I'll sideload F-Droid or some other app depending on my needs (like traveling). https://chuck.is/phone
What you've described seems to me more a 'locked down smartphone' rather than a dumbphone, and the two are not synonyms imho.
It does appear that they are -- at least, I'm seeing them with increasing frequency. I'll be getting one myself once my current smartphone dies.
> I personally can't see myself ever choosing to get a phone with a bad digital camera.
That's fair, but not everyone has the same need. Personally, I would be perfectly fine with a phone that had no camera whatsoever. I almost never use the cameras on my smartphone anyway.
I had alot of fun figuring out how to transcode movies & netflix shows for it, as well as writing J2ME apps. If there was a modern J2ME feature phone with 4G I'd probably use that. Who needs more than 100Mhz on a mobile device, honestly?
https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-6300-4g?sku=16LIOW...
If you have a Mac, you can access all of these on your mac. If you have any other desktop computer I believe you can still use any except FaceTime and iMessage.
A friend of mine has a dumb phone but is still a part of group chats via his computer.
Unless you install the Whatsapp .apk on a desktop (ChromeOS?) I don't think you can easily use Whatsapp without a smartphone
It was actually quite refreshing. It's nice to be back on a Smart Phone, but it was great to break the bad habits and when I picked up a Smart Phone again, I knew what traps I was hoping to avoid falling into and could be much more deliberate in my usage of the tool.
Did the battery die or the whole phone somehow?
I later learned that if you use a portable solar panel battery pack, let the pack charge and then plug in your phone. Don't plug a near-dead solar panel battery pack into your phone and let. There's something about the low-voltage trickle-charge that can be terrible for electronics. I'm not an EE, so I don't understand the details. Perhaps someone else can explain it better.
I'm interested in learning more about this. I recently got a USB solar panel (with no battery). I wonder if it has anything to do with voltage dropping way below USB spec (which I've seen when the panel can't provide the current the device wants, which seems to be pretty easy when the panel is small and/or not in full sun).
Generally I've found that batteries will let you charge xor discharge, and won't let you do both.
I assume that you'd get unexpected voltage/amperage on the discharging side, from the charging side if you tried to do both at the same time
I think the desire is there for a less connected life experience, but some of the utility of smartphones is undeniable, as is the collective action problem around disconnecting from social media, which unless everyone in your social circle does it is tantamount to voluntary social isolation for teens.
Nonetheless, despite repeatedly setting them up, my ("hacked" to have a ton more games, so the content available is extensive and excellent) NES and SNES classics have seen perhaps twenty hours of play between them in (IIRC) about four years, purely because corded controllers are so annoying that every time I think of playing them, I change my mind when I think about untangling the cords and having to adjust where I sit in the room and all that.
I've had nearly zero problems with any 1st-party wireless controllers since they became standard; they've been nothing but an improvement—but, I've lived in detached houses that whole time, so maybe it's just because I've been in relatively low-EM-noise environments.
I do recall friends complaining about reliability on e.g. the Wavebird and other non-standard wireless controllers, on earlier consoles, but I only ever used wired controllers for those generations.
It's perfectly possible to have a dumb phone and with it time-box your screen time to when you are in front of a laptop (that doesn't fit into your pocket). For me it's still 2 hours a day after a long day at work. But that's a lot better than looking at life through the screen nearly every waking hour of a normal day.
I've been doing it for years. And it saved my life metaphorically and also literally.
I am actually about to do it, I think it's actually trivially easy if you give up on the phone number being the same for voice calls. If you have two iPhones then you can still get iMessage on both. And like who needs voice calls. If you really care you could forward one to the other.
The "dumb" one you set up MDM on and disable the browser if you want to really mean it. Just have text messaging, Kindle, spotify/music, and google maps. Seems like a decent compromise.
1. Uninstalling apps for which a mobile web client exists.
2. Walking over to my computer instead of using my phone, even if I could do the same thing on my phone.
3. Use the freed up time with activities that reinforce this habit. For me it's taking physical notes in a notebook.
This really isn't the zing people think it is. Not having a smartphone isn't just hard because you can't look at memes all day, it's hard because society all but requires us to have them to participate.
If anything, if you are able to live in today's world with just a dumb phone, it is a luxury.
I hear this sort of thing a lot, but it certainly isn't anywhere near true in my part of the US. Is this maybe a regional thing?
May be 100 units to 200 units, who knows
Also, never going to happen.
That news will come as a surprise to those people living these days without a smartphone.
I liked the fact that I could be unplugged most of the time but still had access to all the apps I needed but occasionally ran into random pain points where a smart-phone was expected. Such as: QR code menus, having to use a phone to check out a propane tank. Weird stuff like that. Google maps was also horrendous on it.
Between using your phone gps to drive around, ordering food, unlocking doors, and check-in out kids from daycare, while not impossible, it would be very inconvenient to not have a smartphone
Dumb phones are cheap enough to pull this off.
So I switched to the Punkt MP02. It has a lot of other problems, though, but at least those are more passable.
I did also try the Mudita Pure. But it froze on the second day I had it, so I switched back. Edit: My plan is to give the Mudita Pure a fair shot in the future.
I'm generally disappointed in the phone market, smartphone and dumb phone. Maybe I should abandon it entirely and get a landline.
That is one expensive dumb phone.
(I'm in the EU, and I haven't seen a phone sold here (in a shop) that wasn't compatible with all available providers - to be honest, this problem has never crossed my mind when I bought a phone.)
2G is being shutdown too (IIRC, I had a 2G pay-as-you-go phone that stopped working years ago), and it would be surprising to me that a carrier would shutdown 3G before 2G.
Also, updates to SMS implementations eventually broke SMS on the good network.
I have too much desktop-laptop screen time with work and substitutes for true leisure.
don't think for a minute that dumb phones are actually a happening thing for gen z, on a whole they are likely the most zombified generation