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Comment by wds | Hacker News Reader

A few days ago I cracked the edge of my smartphone's screen at just the right spot to shut its display off entirely, though it still works. Using the USB-C dongle meant for my laptop, the phone pops into a desktop view which basically is the same experience as a Chromebook (for better or worse).

In the meantime before its repair, I shoved my SIM card into an old flipphone I had in the tech graveyard drawer. I've actually really liked the limited flipphone experience. It's a mental breath of fresh air to not have a time/focus black hole in my pocket at all times. It made me realize that I've had a pretty bad relationship with my smartphone in terms of how much time I wasted on it. I'm considering keeping the flipphone as my primary phone. Maybe smartphones do too much.

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as someone who did this for a week, it's nice until you need to install an app to check your bank statements or manage your insurance. Maybe that will get better as agents do, however

You don't have a laptop or desktop for those things?

Whilst I may not represent the average person, I have no need to check bank statements or manage insurance immediately, so I can wait until I'm at a 'real' computer to do it more conveniently and easily and with a bigger screen and keyboard and mouse.

GPs point about the 'relationship with the smart phone' seems to be pertinent. "need to install an app" to do these things only makes the point stronger.

> You don't have a laptop or desktop for those things?

> Whilst I may not represent the average person, I have no need to check bank statements or manage insurance immediately

I think a lot of people check to make sure how much money they have before they make some purchases, especially big ones. Or, they check with this card declined (might need to move some money from one account to another or use a different card).

I teach high school and see students doing this all the time when buying food for lunch. I can't imagine it's any less prevalent amongst adults of a certain generation.

I certainly need to know how much money I have at any given time when I'm shopping. Seems fairly privileged (not in a bad way) to not need to think about that.

I take your point, but I'll also make the point that I'm organised and relatively self disciplined when it comes to spending. If I have to check my back account before any big expenditures, whilst on the go and requiring a smart phone, then that represents some kind of failure of self discipline (outside of emergency health situations).

Having said that, I do have an app that tells me how much is left on my debit card, but I only recharge it from laptop / desktop at home - I tend to not let it get low enough that I can't get through a day.

Can't deny a certain level of privilege, but will say it's been earned through self discipline. Everyone's situations are different, however.

My bank only has two options for authentication: Either you use their mobile app or buy an authentication device from them that's the size of a small phone. Either way I need a handheld device.

I can't say I'm happy with the direction of things. They used to offer slips of paper with single-use codes that worked fine, but those are now deprecated in favor of the smartphone app.

You can use a lot of those authentication / bank apps on a tablet without issue. Obviously it’s worth verifying before making the swap to a flip phone, but I like having minimal apps on my smartphone so I still have a backup if needed.

Then your bank is garbage and you should switch to a better one. My main bank (USAA) lets me use a one time code sent to my email as a second factor (or SMS, or a code from their app). If they started requiring me to use the app I would drop them immediately. Why is "but my banking app" treated like a valid objection every time user freedom comes up?

Because it's most banks that are like that. If you don't have this problem, then you're lucky your bank is actually technologically incompetent by industry standards.

> My main bank lets me use a one time code sent to my email as a second factor or SMS

Congratulations, your bank is still relying on the two most easily spoofed 2fac methods

The fact that they are easily spoofed is of no consequence for this use-case: entering an invalid 2FA code will simply fail to log you in into your banking. You should obviously not follow a link from an email that is not obviously coming from your request (and you should validate the top-level domain is what it needs to be even in that case), but you should be entering the bank web site directly.

The bigger problem is SIM swapping, which is more of a social engineering attack.

Maybe GP choses to not use it? What about your "relationsip with the PC"?

For me, time I have in front of my PC is quality time I'd rather not waste on bullshit like banking, or worse, rearrange my life to make activities in that quality time that I could've made on the go in the "time holes" during the day.

Fuck apps, alright, but phones are finally getting useful (despite vendors' attempts to undo that). I switched to a foldable phone 6 months ago, and since then I haven't used my personal laptop for anything, not even once. Foldables are what tablets couldn't be, and despite the toy OS, my Fold7 managed to take over ~all tasks I used to do on the laptop or PC, that don't strongly benefit from physical keyboard and sitting stationary (and a good chunk of the latter too, plugged to a screen via USB-C).

Right, I agree on that, I usually do my banking on the subway or in idle moments in a lobby somewhere. It is frustrating to me the juvenile interface provided by many a banking app but perhaps phones like your fold 7 have ways to bypass this for the "first-class" interfaces a computer grants you? I do understand where the reply to my posts' point is coming from, but I don't know many people now who aren't in the "laptop class" or "gamers" that have a computer anymore, it's a shame to me that something as homogeneous as banking is not yet more abstract and like SMS(not that it's a good role model) rather than the archaic mess with a colorful interface that it is now

You know any iPhone with USB C you can just plug into a monitor right?

and?

You can therefore stick a sim in a dumb phone. And still jave a desktop smartphone for any bank or service that demands an app.

By using a monitor you psychologically change the device from a time sink to a tool.

i was more trying to figure put what the mention of a specific smartphone brand brought to the table

it didn't add anything to the (interesting) parent post

Is that true?

Yes

https://imgur.com/a/aOhnX79

This is my external portable monitor that I usually take with me for my computer. It gets power and video from one USB C cable it works with any computer that can do video over USB-C. It also works with my iPhone with a standard USB C cable.

I also have a USB C to HDMI cable.

Yeah, I plugged mine into my tv a few weeks ago, using a USB-C dock, so I could play the new Katamari game on the 65" screen.

With a ps5 controller hooked up via bluetooth, it was just like having a console.

It was since at least the iPhone 4. I still have the old digital AV connector from before they switched to lightning. It came with a hdmi port and a usb port. You could plug an SD card reader into the usb port and use it as an external HDD for transferring files.

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