Switching to a "dumb" phone made me feel pretty dang smart | Hacker News Reader

Switching to a "dumb" phone made me feel pretty dang smart

botharetrue.substack.com

23 pointsvitabenes48 comments

I equate going "dumb phone" with those guys who dreamed about setting up a homestead in rural Alaska: A nice thought exercise, but well beyond the realm of the practical or even likely (or even possible in some tragic cases).

The world has moved on, and your traditional cellular phone and SMS system is only slightly more useful than the telegraph (especially outside of the USA).

100%

With some proper notifications set up and self control, you can live your "dumb phone" dreams while still not living a comically unpractical life.

> The world has moved on

Movement is not self-justifying. Have you weighed the pros and cons of what movement there has been in the last 5 years due to smart phones?

>traditional cellular phone and SMS system is only slightly more useful than the telegraph (especially outside of the USA).

I can phone or message almost anyone in the world at any moment. Have we forgotten what a magical power that is? Countering your last statement, I count myself lucky to live outside the US , where a smartphone-free life is still very practical for more than just a few die-hard holdouts (a bit like car ownership).

> Movement is not self-justifying.

Nothing is self-justifying.

Things move. You either move with them and adapt, or they leave you behind.

Or I can decide that “forward” is bad and go somewhere else. Let’s not forget that those pushing apps and smart devices care only for sales and profits.

Of course you can, just like the homesteaders. Nobody is going to stop you; they'll just leave you behind.

Ironically, it’s very easy to literally overtake a phone zombie, whether on foot or by car.

Comments like these really reinforce how happy I am to not have to live in the US of A.

> The world has moved on, and your traditional cellular phone and SMS system is only slightly more useful than the telegraph (especially outside of the USA).

I don't find that. I broke down and got an Android phone some years back because I needed it for work, and I've since gotten a newer one. It's nice but it doesn't do anything that I consider important other than phone calls and SMS. I use it for road navigation, but previously used a standalone Garmin GPS that was superior in many ways. I occasionally check email or look at web sites while outside the house, but it's usually not that important. And I use the camera and clock, but I had a digicam and wristwatch before that, so again not that big a deal.

I know some people are glued to their phones night and day but it doesn't exicte me that much. I'm as much of an internet zombie as most people here, but primarily at home, where I mostly use a laptop rather than a phone. The phone isn't a good substitute since it has a tiny screen, no keyboard, and too much of a GUI-driven OS. I prefer a traditional CLI environment with gcc and emacs and so on.

Maybe the bay area is a particularly dystopian hellscape compared to the rest of the US, but here are some things that don't work here without a smartphone:

- Going to large event venues. Ticketmaster implemented a rotating barcode system, specifically to prevent people from using printed tickets. You have to either (1) use their webpage at the event where there's no cell service (2) install their malware on your phone or (3) on iOS add the ticket to Apple Wallet.

- Park in touristy areas. Parking meters still accept quarters, but a typical parking session is $20-$50, and the meters don't appear to be physically large enough to accept that many quarters.

- Charge your electric vehicle (Unless it's a tesla, maybe? Mine isn't.)

- Get into your office building (if you still have a commute)

- Get the lowest available rate for public transit

- Ticketmaster: no idea, I haven't gone to those events since the 20th century. It does sound dystopian but also for most people, at most a very occasional thing, no reason to carry a smartphone every day. Especially if there is no cell service at those events, you don't need a phone per se.

- Parking: parking meters here take credit cards. They also take 1 dollar coins which are slightly bigger than quarters. I used to carry a few in my car for that purpose.

- EV charging: hmm ok, though sort of a niche use. There are some chargers near here but idk what it takes to use them. Maybe I'll check.

- Office building: I'm used to access cards, has that changed? Anyway if I need it for work, that's a work phone, not a personal phone, more or less. And it also sounds dystopian, if it requires cell service to work, or if you have to install a malware app.

- public transit: idk if it's even possible to pay with a phone here. They want us to use the Clipper card, clippercard.com.

I've never had a problem being able to pick up tickets at the will call office at venues here

Haters gonna hate, but in 2023 it's real. I have a month-to-month for both a smart/dumb phone and just use/take with me whichever whenever. Need the app verification infra for work and basically only use it for that. Most of the time the smart phone is at home and i'm "free"

Why not switch to a landline and an answering machine?

I’ve known two people who did the dumbphone thing. What brought them back to smartphones was not because it made life difficult for them. Rather, it made life difficult for their friends and family. Eventually they succumbed and went back to a smartphone.

Not just phones, but there are a lot of things you can do if you choose to ignore various aspects of society around you. But can’t if you cannot.

It's amazing how people freak out when they "can't get a hold of you," after being trained to expect instant responses via smartphones.

It’s not instant responses. It’s more that the many peoples’ first line of communication is no longer voice calls, and old fashioned SMS doesn’t cut it either.

The price of participating in society is to conform to it. You can choose not to, but then you are choosing to live with the consequences. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth it, but it’s also society’s decision to whether it’s worth putting up with your eccentricities.

Hmm maybe in your experience. I don't know anyone who can't or wont use sms instead of an online messenger. The consistent complaint is that they can't get ahold of me as fast as they used to, because I'm not glued to my phone anymore.

Also, I find it kind of interesting that you equate "owning a smartphone," with "participating in society." I participate in society just fine without a smartphone, and in fact most people are very impressed that I ditched the smartphone and say they wish they could do the same, but of course, "they can't."

Voice calls aren't good enough for people anymore. SMS "doesn't cut it." These are just excuses. Unless you can't afford a phone plan, and rely on your smartphone for its wi-fi capabilities, i would say it is fact YOU, the smartphone owner, who are demanding unreasonable things of me, the dumbphone owner.

Smartphone owners have no right to demand anything of you. It’s your freedom to use a dumbphone.

Along the same lines, why should you, the dumbphone owner in the stark minority, expect the majority to cater to any of your whims? If the majority consider you a burden to include in their communications because they have to go the extra mile, that’s on you, not them. If not, more power to you.

I had a longer reply, but probably most of it is irrelevant. In any case, everyone’s social circle is different, but this is the general observation I see everywhere around me both on and offline.

Because it's my right to live in a society that doesn't force me to own a tracking device just to be able to do anything.

The "burden" you talk about is not real. It's just people's attention spans getting shorter and shorter, and as that is normalized, they stop thinking of it as a problem. The burden is in fact on me, a I have to deal with a bunch of dopamine addicts who have lost their ability to reason on the subject.

I call people all the time. They love it! They realize they honestly have forgotten what it's like to be in connection with a human voice when we communicate. Most people around me will admit they hate their smartphones. Somehow I am the only one who has figured out how to exist without one.

I mean really. "Go the extra mile." That's what we call taking 5 seconds to send a text or a phone call now.

this is kind of silly. there's absolutely no comparison between being completely self-sufficient and using a phone that can't access the internet. the oversized reactions to these stories always remind me of the mindset of addicted people. and for full disclosure I've had a dumb phone for over a year. I had no way miss my smartphone it was a total curse on my life.

There's definitely a comparison. The needs and wants that lead people to imagine themselves in rural alaska are the same needs and wants that lead one to saying "i gotta get a dumb phone."

You're cajoling it into a one-for-one, equal sized comparison. But's it's really the same concept with two instantiations- one much smaller, one much larger.

I guess the main reason I got a dumbphone was to feel MORE connected to other people and society, not less. I don't think that owning a dumb phone is really comparable to living in a cabin by yourself in the woods surrounded by nothing but trees and animals.

There are some people that very much like that though.

I did the same thing* almost a year ago and honestly I feel much healthier and more productive. I honestly wish I did it earlier. I still do all the things I did before, news, youtube and all, but only on my desktop PC which limits me to shorter more purposeful sessions online.

* I did not get an LP2, but a Jelly2. The screen is impracticably small for doom scrolling, but I still need a phone for Messenger (family), Spotify (running/working) and other stupid crap (that pay parking stall that wont accept fucking coins)

I think the light phone is a great idea but with some caveats that makes me not want to make me jump.

If they made it an open platform so I could code my own apps into it, that'd be great and email would probably be nice. I only check my email when I have to anyway so that doesnt give me stress. It's async!

A bigger battery would be nice. If they are rocking an e-ink display it would be nice with a phone that lasts a week or more.

I used a degoogled pixel 6 pro for a while, and it got multi-day battery life until I installed the google play services. After that, it dropped to the advertised ~ 1 day life.

Between not having tracking crap and notification polling waking the modem up and the e-ink display, I'd expect them to already be at half a week.

Anyway, I'd love to see someone build a high-spec dumb phone that's minimally distracting and that that respects privacy.

I've been trying to find a dumb phone for a technologically challenged family member, and it seems like they don't exist any more. Remember that 2g and 3g phones are now bricked by carriers shutting down those networks, so don't suggest one of those. Ultra expensive baubles like the Light phone are basically jewelry rather than tools. There are a few basic phones like the Nokia 225 that support 4g, but they have extra crap like rudimentary facebook, they have limited frequency bands (the 225 only supports T-mobile around here), and their battery runtime is much worse than advertised. I'd be happy with the equivalent of an old school Motorola flip or brick phone (i.e. 1+ pound weight is fine, I don't need tiny, I need simple). But it doesn't exist.

I decided that the best bet is to get a cheap Android phone and reprogram it to be a dumb phone, constantly running the phone app in kiosk mode with everything else disabled. I'm not an Android programmer but maybe this is something I'd like to try implementing.

afaik, there are specialized low-tech (ish) launchers for android available, maybe that will suffice

I would recommend "Unlauncher" from F-Droid.

Thanks! I'll look for it.

Edit: found it, but unfortunately it still looks too complicated. I want something where it is impossible to get the dialing keypad off the screen, the equivalent of a dumb phone with physical buttons.

you can also simply buy a second-hand flip phone off of any online marketplace. there are lots of resellers in this space.

If you mean an old school flip phone, they don't work because of the 2g/3g shutdown. If you mean a current one, they have similar issues to the Nokia 225 plus are expensive. Oh well.

I have a Kyocera DuraXE 4G LTE. It cost me $250 Canadian, bought it off of Ebay. There are more phones like this.

Thanks, and wow that is expensive. I'll look around for phones like that though. A Moto G Play is a pretty good phone from what I can tell (Android 12), and it is 100 USD new. So paying 2x that for a used dumbphone is painful.

You get what you pay for. Any of the "rugged" phones like my Kyocera should last a lifetime.

I used this website to find it https://josebriones.org/dumbphone-finder

Thanks, I'll see what I can find, but plenty of 2g and 3g rugged phones are unusable now because of network shutdowns even though the phone hardware is still perfectly good. I have several non-rugged phones in similar straits. I'm told that 4g is now gradually getting displaced by 5g, though I expect it will keep working for a while. That and replacement battery availability seem like limiting factors. Also, from sad experience, the micro USB charge port has finite lifetime so I wonder what it will take to repair it.

The DuraXE does look like a good phone though it has imho non-dumbphone features like wifi. I guess I better check its network coverage and will look into it. According to PC Mag it runs Android 5.1 under the covers, which is a little bit scary to me.

A Baofeng ham walkie talkie is about as rugged as a typical "rugged" phone and costs around $25 so I don't see why there's no phone in roughly the same format. Until the 2g shutdown you could buy 2g phone modules for a few USD, that had some analog audio wires and some control lines and a power wire, so you could make your own phone around it pretty simply. Sparkfun had a product that was one of those built into a vintage rotary phone. I don't think they have those modules for 4g or 5g but I should look again, I guess.

Added: aha re 4g modules, this is $60+ but looks interesting, and makerfabs has some other neat stuff:

https://www.makerfabs.com/maduino-zero-4g-lte-sim7600.html

you are right that it is not a true dumb phone. I never use the Wi-Fi and it has no data so I often forget it even exists. that's a good point about the operating system I hadn't checked into that. I was just happy to get something that worked and didn't break easily and had no 24/7 internet access.

I do think that more and more people are starting to want less intrusion by the devices in their life so I wouldn't be surprised if a true affordable dumb phone enters the market in the next few years.

I guess the most important feature from my perspective is a physical keyboard. My most common "support request" is that the person wants to use the phone dialing app and can't figure out how to return to it or launch it. So I want a dumb phone or UI, where the dial pad is always there and always works. The only other feature I want is a clock, that should also always be on screen, that shows the time and date.

Everything else, such as camera, messaging, calendar, contacts (except maybe a few predefined contact buttons that are always there), etc., should all be absent or inaccessible. And, I have gotten the person a digital wristwatch for xmas, so that might relieve the clock requirement.

there are quite a lot of senior phones with large buttons and dumb phone type numpads. I don't know if any of them are true dumb phones however.

AFAICT they are all carrier locked and they want you to buy overpriced subscriptions from them. That seems in poor taste.

Added: that people are willing to pay premium subscription fees for a sufficiently dumb phone really shows that it's a desirable product and regular vendors should be selling unlocked ones.

never had a problem with any of the carriers here in Canada using phones from Europe and Asia for seniors. subscriptions were the same price as any other flip phone.

They make smart phones that only present a dialer and messaging app. And maybe brickbreaker. The fact that it's on 4g & will be using rcs or ip-based messaging is really irrelevant.

I’m not a fan of the tone of this piece, and it’s pretty dull listening to the author get excited about shilling for this new phone and then find out it’s kind of useless over and over, only to rate it using some silly made up scale. Like it got old after the second round. This passage at the beginning basically establishes the pattern:

> it was time to finally float into the heavens of dumb phone peace … Fast forward three weeks and I’m lost as fuck driving in my own neighborhood … being way less stressed overall because you must surrender to the simple truth that you’re just a guy trying to make his way home: 10/10

And it basically just goes on like that.

I don’t know who this was written for, but it’s not me.

On the one hand, I get that they’re trying to go as minimalistic as possible, and so this phone makes a lot of concessions.

On the other hand… the experience of using this phone seems worse than a Nokia 3310 two decades ago, especially when it comes to texting. Typing on that little hardware keyboard was unbeatable, and far better than relying on voice recognition.

If I were switching to a dumbphone I’d want it to at least be as good as that (bonus points if the battery life was just as good; even less distraction).

Are there no old-school dumb phones anymore? Have they all moved on?

Checking eBay there are plenty of old-school dumb phones to be had. I don't know if they work on modern networks but you could get an old school phone every year for the rest of your life on eBay.

I've looked a bit, and realized what I really want is a distraction-free phone that's otherwise fully functional.

None of these things are a problem:

- podcast + music streaming

- local search + navigation

- high end camera (I don't care if my daily driver phone costs $100 or $1000+ as long as it lasts > 4 years)

- sms + signal

- phone calls

- mobile payments (including shitty parking apps, plane tickets, etc)

- internet of sh*t controller apps (car, appliances, etc).

- weather

- calendar

- email

- document scanning and file management

The main problems are:

- web browser

- news apps

So, basically, what I want is a mobile phone ecosystem where the apps don't assume a web browser is installed (local search, mobile payments, my car, weather, tickets, etc, etc, apps all assume a web browser), and where I can uninstall the web browser and the news app.

On the other hand, I'd like to live in a world where you don't need to install a bunch of malicious code on your machine in order to do basic day-to-day things, which would push me towards that web-browser-only phone OS that Mozilla tried to build.

I don't have a great solution. The only thing I can think of is that, in the same way that businesses are legally required to accept cash, they should also be legally required to provide a sane, supported API so third party apps and operating systems can use their services (yes; I know that this is impractical too).

Fucking precisely.

I don't think I could do a phone that's this dumb (I really like using my Apple Watch, and I'm in pre-sales and salespeople LOVE calling and texting) but I went back to my iPhone 13 mini after using an iPhone 15 Pro for a few weeks. It's just too big, and I already hate using my phone.

I would love a "first principles" phone that has a very limited but very well designed feature set.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com