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Comment by retrocryptid | Hacker News Reader

I wanted a dumbphone so I could avoid the crapware in android. But then I saw the Punkt MP01 with it's 4G hotspot and lust filled my heart.

So then I had a smartphone with android crapware and a very bad UI.

It did keep me from doomscrolling at the bus stop, so there is that.

I suspect the "iPhone of modern dumbphones" hasn't been invented yet. My gut feeling is there are about as many reasons people want to use dumbphones as there are people using dumbphones so getting "one dumbphone to rule them all" the same way the apple and Samsung have is a ways off.

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Jobs did his thing with the iPhone. He took a complex and indecipherable phone market and removed pretty much all choice.

It worked brilliantly and if your phone is not a featureless slab of glass you have an insignificant niche of a market.

This idea of “one dumb phone to rule them all” is what every carrier in the world was trying to do in 2005 and we ended up with hundreds of ambitious and doomed designs.

What I miss most about the pre-iPhone era is that I didn’t think about my phone unless I needed to communicate with someone in my real life.

The dumb phone isn’t making a huge comeback. People escape into their smartphones.

But I appreciate this movement that in return offers us an escape from the smartphone

> ...every carrier in the world was trying to do in 2005 and we ended up with hundreds of ambitious and doomed designs...

However, one could also note that such an admittedly messy period was needed to arrive at a more fit approach - not so different i suppose conceptually to evolution in general. Also, i suppose that to Apple's credit, their iphone popularized the concept of "phone apps" - whether those exist as websites or actual mobile apps as we know them today - and that explosion of mobile apps triggered more evolution...i feel however that evolution has stagnated a bit and more recently there is an emergence of different changing environment, which may trigger either a new evolutuon...or who knows maybe create a more permanent a split - where one set of users will stick to the conventional smart phones, while the other fork of the split will create a new market of new type of phone users (sort of like current dumbphones but with at least a little more functionality)...and i woiuld guess mobile providers - both manufactureres as well as cellular providers - will choose to meet the market demands or choose to ignore this market. I for one hope to be a customer of some sort of smart phone that is NOT how the current smart phones offerings exist on the current marketplace. I myself want a smaller phone, but i also still like using websites and a few other "smart" features (e.g. camera, mapping, etc.)...and i also want that phone to last many years (do not want to buy a phone every 2 years)...etc. ;-)

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