Some young adults disconnecting with 'dumbphones'
articles.chicagotribune.com
articles.chicagotribune.com
I live in Chicago. Google Maps knows when the bus is coming, and which buses to take to get somewhere quickly. I don't have to plan very far ahead or keep to a strict schedule to make certain trains, since I know I can just pull out my phone and figure out a reasonable way to get home when it's time.
As a student from another city, I have only enough understanding of the geography to read Google Maps critically - for the details, it's indispensable.
Just uninstalling Facebook might be a nice middle route though.
There's only a couple of trains, and they shouldn't be very hard to get a handle on.
All of this is easy for me to say (having been born in Chicago), but there's really not a lot to memorize. It's no New York.
Edit: Here's a tip; memorize the major East-West boulevards on the North side (their order, if not their number.) The city is Cartesian, and that helps a lot with the conversion.
I recently visited SF and mostly used public transportation to get around. Google Maps was awesome.
Not having maps is extremely limiting. Sure, if I'm going a few places I can check google maps beforehand, plan out a route, and get to my destination. The flexibility to deviate from that is completely lost, and why I have to alternate between the two phones.
Battery life trumps navigation, for me, comfortably. If I'm lost after a long day, I need the option to phone my destination.
For comparison, I occasionally don't charge my phone for two weeks.
Edit: apologies for editing :)
I wouldn't really know, because never have I been in a situation where I actually used my phone nonstop for 9 hours. =]
For my typical usage, the battery will last several days at least and probably a bit more if I put more effort into reducing battery consumption. I actually don't know how long it'll last since it's never died. Definitely not two weeks, but long enough for me to not really worry about the battery life.
All that said, I can definitely see the appeal of a phone that lasts two weeks. I think the Note 3 sits at a decent compromise between that and my old phone, a Galaxy S3, which could barely last 8 hours (of typical, very intermittent usage).
If I were to carry a smartphone for this purpose then I would get a worse experience than I do on a larger screen, and it would hinder my ability to use telephony services when I need them.
For my needs, those services do not belong in one device.
In Canada, I see everyone using Maps to navigate because the cities are structured so bad it's hard for even the natives to navigate.
One reason is that Lahore is divided into gated housing authorities (which is bad for a lot of other reasons) but to get to your destination you just need directions to the the gated community. One inside, everything is neatly divided into grid structured blocks and numbered streets which are easy to navigate.
Calgary's streets have names not numbers. (Erin Grove, SE) tells me almost nothing about where the street is located. Even if I were a native I would need a map for unfamiliar streets.
Also, because people in Lahore are generally poor (most people don't have cars) and not very literate, the city grows in a way that they can navigate. Nothing to be proud of, but that is probably the reason I would say Lahore is 'better' designed.
Lahore has four levels of transit system available. There is a cross-city Metro bus system (which has a dedicated overhead road for itself so effectively a train). There are big buses which run long routes. There are shorter vans which run shorter routes. There are 'route'-rickshaws which even run even shorter routes. And if you are rich, there is a fifth option of getting a taxi-rickshaw at 10x price.
All this makes the system extremely robust (if bus is late you can eg. take a two van combo), and because all 4 systems compete with each other the transit system is time efficient and cheap.
So minimum bus/van/route-rickshaw fare is 15 PKR. Might have gone up to 20 PKR since I was home. Max goes up to about 50-60 PKR. (you pay for how far you want to go).
taxi-rickshaws can cost anywhere from 30 PRK (1 km) to 600 PKR cross city (20-30). Depends on from where to where you are going, time of the day, and your ability to haggle.
I wouldn't put it down to bad city planning though. From my limited experience of visiting Seattle (about 3 weeks) I sensed that it's got more to do with people don't want to be bothered and left alone. Where as in India if I ask one person for direction I get at least half a dozen people telling me how to get there, which bus to take and what not!
Cabs and auto-rickshaws in Bangalore are notorious for swindling huge sums of money by pretending that they know nothing about the city where in reality they know every nook and corner. They do this so that they can take you all over the place and on top of that bill you exorbitant amounts. And if you are a westerner then just don't go anywhere near them unless you know the exact route to take!
>The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city.
This is definitely not the case as the public transport cover just about every part of the city, even where autos hesitate to take. It's just that you need at least a month to figure out the routes, buses, transits etc., which gives the perception of non-existent public transport. I lived in Bangalore for 7 years before I started using public transport and despite being a local, Kannada being my mother tongue, it took me about a month to get it right.
From my personal limited experience of visiting various metros in India I'm fairly confident that Bangalore has the largest public bus transportation in India.
>The indications in the street were hard to find and see.
That's probably because there aren't any :). There are very few on arterial roads but even they aren't reliable as the one-way traffic rules change very so often!
Frequency of public transport is typically proportional to the population density. People are more likely to want to know the time of the next bus/train/tram when the cost of missing it is a 20 minute wait.
Managing population density is definitely part of city planning and I'd suggest limiting it has a more beneficial impact on quality of life than more frequenct public transport.
I live in one of the most denstly populated areas on earth and for me at least, the benefit of having a train interval of < 2 minutes does not offset the downside of having no space. E.g.:
- Peak train density >6 people per sq meter (1.8 sq ft per person)
- Peak urban density ~130,000 people per sq km (333,000 per sq mile)
With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."
My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.
With a generic "smartphone" you do, with an iPhone you just swipe up from the bottom right corner. It's nicely sandboxed outside the lock screen - you can see the photos you just took, but to review other photos you need to enter your PIN.
Sony smartphones work the same way
I have an old OS Blackberry Bold and I use the camera in class to photo student work and email it to a webmail account in-lesson then pop it on projector. I also use music player with 3.5mm lead to play podcasts &c. Fairly quick to use. Students encouraged to photo screens/whiteboards and email them in &c.
As a more mature (cough) person, I make limited personal use of social media and tend not to have very high traffic. The 'smartish' aspect is all data collection.
As a student from another city, I have only enough
understanding of the geography to read Google Maps
critically - for the details, it's indispensable.
People used to have maps, or just go out and explore new places. Not only learn the streets, but find great restaurants, coffee shops, stores, meet new and interesting people.
I am amazed daily at how these things have instilled learned helplessness into people in such a short time span.
I'm guessing students were less bold with CTA and took more cabs, or else avoided going out unless they knew the could afford a lengthy adventure getting home.
It wasn't impossible before, but it's certainly easier.
1. http://phys.org/news/2010-11-reliance-gps-hippocampus-functi...
Storytelling is/was a great human tradition, perhaps the defining one in a literal sense. It's becoming extinct because of literacy. Today it's considered an eccentric pursuit.
That doesn't mean literacy is bad or that campfire stories repeated and evolved for generations are better than novels or films. But, oral storytelling as art or culture has characteristics that just aren't present in novels just like novels have characteristics that aren't present in TV shows.
If you are willing to be more abstract about it, you might compare it to working as an Apple engineer and collecting edible roots near a stream. The former is clearly superior as a way of feeding your family. The latter still has certain human qualities that are beneficial to people and worth preserving.
As we move forward we lose some things which may be valuable. Nostalgia and the desire to preserve is not a bad thing.
However, there are things that movies can do that plays definitely can't do, and the reverse is true as well.
I think that there's room for both!
For me - they suck. I have a lousy sense of direction. Despite actively trying to improve it for decades I regularly got lost. Not lost in the fun-exploring-new-places sort of way - but lost in the fuck-me-going-to-miss-the-last-train-home sort of way. I used to regularly schedule in hours of extra time for "just in case" scenarios. I used to avoid unfamiliar locations and over-plan trips to extreme degrees. I never wandered off the beaten track in the middle of the day - coz I could easily spend hours finding my way back.
I now go to strange places with almost zero planning. I can just pick a random direction for a walk and be confident that I can come back again. They have saved me probably weeks of prep time and contingency time at this point, and have let me go to many places that I would have otherwise never have visited. They have lifted a huge weight of worry from my shoulders every time I had to get from A to B.
So for me google maps et al have freed me from the learned helplessness of traditional maps.
In many ways, this would have been a better model for the navigating consumer. GPS devices operated on a one-time purchase model -- no subscription, no contracts, no data caps. Maps were shipped with the device, and many came with free lifetime updates. Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.
There are also broader implications. Without smartphones, AT&T and Verizon would have lost a lucrative revenue stream. Their best choice for deploying capital would have been to build fiber to the home. Not a bad trade -- smartphones for gigabit broadband in every house.
With wireless at a technological plateau, maybe T-Mobile and Sprint could have caught up. Perhaps we'd have seen more robust competition to the duopoly, and lower prices.
This is alternate history. But it's alternate history along the lines of Douglas North, who dared to question the economic benefits of railroads.
> Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.
It's a natural broadcasting application. You really don't need point-to-point. Eventually when DTV came along, it might've been datacast over ATSC.
A lot of technology is path-dependent. We got smartphones, so everything went one way. Without smartphones, the very same clever people would've been working on other solutions.
It would have been different -- worse in some ways, better in others.
If you read my original post, you will notice that I focus on the mobile broadband connection as the distinguishing feature of a smartphone. It is this feature that kept people locked into cellular contracts, raised the barriers to entry in the wireless world, ended Verizon's FiOS deployment, and ushered in the always-connected smartphone world that we live in today.
Technological realities are often more path-dependent than we like to pretend. Pay TV could be dominated by wired cable television (US), or broadcast satellite (Europe and Asia). We could've ended up in a Minitel world or an Internet world. A lot depends on business decisions and other non-tech dynamics.
In our case, it was the iPhone/AT&T combination that determined our path. That is why I used the definition that AT&T uses in exploring what it meant to live in a world without "smartphones." AT&T refuses to activate smartphones on its postpaid network without a data plan. Any phone that doesn't require a data plan is considered a featurephone.
The iPhone was an important milestone in smartphone development, most critically with regard to usability, but it was initially a step backwards in many ways compared to smartphones that had already been on the market for years, and lacked even 3G that had been available in other smartphones for some time.
As someone who spent the majority of their life with only that option available, I very strongly doubt that.
Actually 10 years ago I got lost all the time, would ask my way to people with very vague memory and not much of a talent to give direction, in the worst cases I would pay a taxi after a while to bring me back to a known point, and got taxed huge amounts when the taxi guy would also get lost because the address wasn't correct.
Some people (i.e me) are really bad at orienting and reading maps. Before Google Maps I had a "dumbphone" with a GPS app, and it changed my life (even when going new places I could go back in a predictable amount of time. Imagine the impact).
> Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7
> years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google
> Maps
At one point, earlier, people didn't even have paper maps, so why stop there?
You're conflating helplessness with convenience. Yes, people used to do things the hard way. Now we get to do them the easy way.
I definitely agree with you that removing social network apps is a great way to improve productivity a bit. And of course, if you don't need the apps listed above, then, yes, there isn't much point in paying extra for a smartphone. But please realize that many people are willing to pay for the significant convenience that a smartphone affords them.
Not using a smartphone just because of the battery life or durability though is silly. A specialized case will nearly solve both problems. There are privacy concerns and productivity concerns and price concerns, sure. But this is the future - and we should be trying to address those concerns and change them for the better, not fight smartphones altogether.
I've heard a number of my friends complain about facebook, initially, and later about smartphones. While I understand that the 'pull' of checking what's going on in your social network, or checking out the latest funny picture posted on reddit, I think the solution is not (necessarily( to get off facebook or get a dumbphone, but rather to learn how to responsibly use a potentially highly addictive tool.
Perhaps this is a problem that only plagues these kinds of transitional periods. I've noticed, for example, that my younger sister (~15) is absolutely addicted to her phone and whatsapp, and my parents, who are generally quite responsible and firm in how they raised us, don't even really seem to notice the problem. And perhaps that's because it's so new, like television was once.
Not consuming content would be misusing it. Like buying an expensive TV to watch the news once a day. Why waste money on things you won't utilize most of the time?
Second, 'content consumption' is a bit vague. I'd say a smartphone is worth having because so many people use whatsapp instead of sms, because it has google maps, because I can check my trello board occasionally, because I can check the weather, and very frequently to find out how to get from A to B using public transport. None of that requires me to be constantly 'consuming', but it's still very useful.
In fact, For a full two years I had a smartphone (Nexus) with no data plan, and it was still worth having. It functioned as my calendar, notepad, dictation device, and even maps (although it is less useful offline).
I'm a programmer who spends too much time on the computer. And the problem is not the time I spend but my mindset while I'm on it. I adopt an idleness and unwillingness to do anything off the computer. Worse, just having access to a computer makes me less likely to do other things. Should I read a new book, or go on the computer? If I have a computer next to me, it's simply more comfortable to go on it than to open a book.
A smartphone would do to me what a computer already does. And for those who have the same problem as me, I'd argue that in this case the perspective of someone without a smartphone is less biased than that of someone who does.
That's not an indictment of smartphones but of myself. My wife does just fine with a smartphone, taking it out only to check her calendar.
My solution: dumbphone in my pocket, Nexus 7 tablet in my bag. If I leave home without a bag, I won't need more than a phone. Otherwise, I have access to maps, mail, etc. but need to make a conscious decision to take it out - and look ridiculous when I walk around with it, which helps with the addictive part as well.
Two more things I can add though:
- A smartphone is sort of a replacement to a computer but not a very good one at that. Typing's more fiddly, last I checked the SSH clients were annoying, you don't have that much freedom out of the box.
- My £5 phone is nigh indestructible compared to your average smartphone. I can throw it about as much as I want to (though I've never felt the need to) and if it breaks, I'm not too fussed about it. Nobody in their right mind would want to steal it, but if they do, I don't have to worry about any of my data or accounts being exposed.
I use my smartphone to read books. I use it to listen to audiobooks. I download educational videos (coursera courses and the like) and watch them on my smartphone during my bus commute. There are many other ways I could use it other than mindlessly browsing the web.
I believe it's not the device to blame, but the person making use (or misuse) of it.
To avoid distractions, I find it useful to place it into "flight mode".
Forgive the analogy, you're pretty much the guy telling someone with alcohol problems that "I drink a couple of microbrews now and then, it's very tasty. You don't have to drink every day. Don't blame the beer, blame yourself!"
I guess both solutions are valid, it's a matter of preference.
My personal opinion is that my solution is taking more control of my life. "I choose how to use a device to my benefit". Other solution seems to be applying external restrictions to supplement the lack of control. "I can not control my urge to disuse the device, so I'd better throw it away, lock it up etc.". I like my approach more, but both are valid of course.
I mean, come on — preferring a low-tech phone is not like fleeing to an uninhabited island. To use my (perhaps silly) analogy, it's more like choosing not to keep any booze at home. Or to leave home without a hip flask. ;)
Think about how weird it is that you would consider not having a smartphone as equivalent to "locking oneself up somewhere." Almost nobody had a smartphone until 2008.
But: I will never own a personal (not for development) Android or iPhone. They're bad products dominated by vendors who hate their own customers, and plot against them in order to enable business strategies based on restricting choice.
Right now, with this 'healthy' market of 2 vendors (for how many billion people?), dumbphone here I come...
One thing I'm looking forward to with my future dumbphones are how disposable they are if they turn out to be horrible.
Ditto laser eye surgery and pretty much anything else remotely medical in nature.
Chocolate is not a healthy market either: http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/01/why-so-little-candy-variety...
Orthodontia and laser eye surgery are examples of the types of healthy markets that flourish in the absence of over-regulation.
You also seem to be conflating the health of markets and some idiosyncratic issues of your own regarding discovering competent suppliers.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/orthodontist
or·tho·don·tics
a branch of dentistry that deals with helping teeth to grow straight
If we're not even going to argue about the same thing, I'm done here.
Whenever there are no individual participants large enough or enough participants colluding to cause regulatory capture.
The US isn't interested in healthy markets anymore.
Second worst.
* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped
* the gps started taking anywhere from 30 minutes to never to get a lock
the gps bug finally made me say "okay, i can't deal with this any more" and get an android.
Thinking about getting another from ebay, but I don't know how to make sure I don't get one of the Hong Kong forgeries (burnt by that once before.)
>* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped
This has always been due to overmultitasking for me. I keep my processlist pretty lean and don't install a lot of daemons - and I haven't missed a call due to that for a few years now.
Slides for hellaphone here http://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-20/dc-20-presentations/F...
Edit: Add slides link
Deleted comment
One of my hopes is that Jolla will come through, and my other is that Maemo might be successfully rebased onto mainline Debian rather than crazy, un-upgradable Debian.
Most of the time I just, you know, use land lines at the places where I'm at.
If for some desperate reason, there's something that prevents me from tolerating a ~30 drive without in-situ communication, I mull over the idea of carrying a phone, and in the minutes it takes me to arrive at a decision, I usually just call the person I need to speak to, and square away the details on the spot.
Yeah, people have to try three or four numbers to get a hold of me sometimes, but like, that's their problem.
Almost there... :)
I already have mini hear attacks if I misplaced my phone because of all the data on it. My mails, my password manager etc. I really don't know if I would add my keys and my money to this. If lost, you literally are left with nothing.
- Phone calls
- SMS
- FM Radio
- Flashlight
- Snake
- 528h standby / 8h talking
- Casual apps: calculator, calendar, countdown, converter, ...
- SPEAKING CLOCK
- Can be used as a ball to play catch sports
[1]: http://www.nokia.com/in-en/phones/phone/nokia-1280/specifica...
The flashlight is handy too, major upgrade from my last dumb phone.
edit: also, I like the lack of SMS space - it decreases my reliance on the device. I write down the important stuff and purge the rest monthly. SMS is a rubbish format for keeping my brain in.
I think at some point we'll look at smartphones the way we look at tobacco: a hard to quit, annoying habit…
Can't say I see that happening. As many users already mentioned smartphones add great value to people's day to day.
I was obviously exaggerating, still I think a better objection to myself would be that smartphones are not as bad for your health.
However, I do get a HUGE amount of use out of my phone as a tool. I handle email, keep notes, use the camera for notes, manage files using Dropbox, and listen to music/podcasts (which help me be productive). I don't feel like phones are a bad thing.
I do have an iPad which serves as a great middle ground, portable nearly full featured computing when I need it, but it's not quite so temptingly convenient to pull out and distract myself in the middle of a conversation or restaurant.
(Actually my phone is a fairly well provisioned feature phone, an AT&T Z431 with a browser and email and GPS and camera, but I don't have a data plan to use any of it. All I do is voice calls and text on AT&T's cheapo prepaid plan.)
Hence why I'm using combination of a dumbphone (that I must charge weekly) and a 7'' wifi tablet. This gives me best of both world and also makes it easier to 'disconnect' from the twitter addiction while staying reachable for emergencies.
In the end though, they are way more problematic:
Standby and talk time battery life just isn't there.
I don't want to be tracked not just by the phone company, but by Apple or Google, or any other company with an app on the thing.
Security is another issue, especially if you're connecting to a VPN or other business resources.
When I'm meeting with someone, they and the topic at hand are the subject of my focus. Smartphones destroy that focus.
Smartphones are making us dumber, ruder and less considerate of others. I've watched twenty-something couples out on dinner dates never speak, but completely focused on their smartphones--even when eating. Someone you want to introduce yourself to? They're doing something on their smartphone. And there's nothing more irritating than speaking to someone about a project and they whip out their smartphone to text or update/check statuses. "It's ok, I can multitask." Yeah, right.
Don't use a VPN.
Turn your phone off or on silent when meeting with people.
As far as tracking, should you be worried about Apple and Google, when the NSA has access to all of this.
I also have a pager. Because of the frequency spectrum it's on, it almost always has connection.
Note that AT&T will not allow you to activate this phone without a data plan. Just use a different provider.
He's more than able to afford any phone out there, but just doesn't like the constant connection. He does own an iPod Touch that he uses on occasion with wifi, but mostly keeps it in his bag.
+ No email--no, fuck you, you can't bug me during dinner because of something that just occurred to you.
+ No touchscreen--I can text without looking at my phone because I can feel the buttons.
+ It actually works as a phone, comfortably.
+ Battery lasts many days without issue.
+ I don't have to worry about it running arbitrary programs or getting viruses.
+ My old Nokia candybar was basically indestructible and waterproof. Even if it broke, replacing it was dirt cheap.
(Mobile users get it even worse.)
One day, one day!
That's why there's the "Mobile Data" button that disables syncing, etc (At least on Android Phones)
I also don't need to read every email or see every notification (I leave them to not make a sound)
Unfortunately even like this battery life is 2 days tops for a new battery
It might be a bit selfish but I'll return your call when I feel like it, or not at all... generally its easier just to stop in and see someone face to face to resolve things.
The only reason I currently have a smart phone is work got annoyed with me and purchased me one (and a monthly contract), as I build and maintain our company mobiles apps. Suppose I should have emotive and behavioural affiliation with I'm building :) couldn't really win that argument. I'm looking forward to the day I leave and I can hand the phone back TBH... although I'm sure my other half isn't LOL bet I loose that argument as well.
Still hasn't changed my behaviour though. The only thing that has is the camera. I used to lug around heavier larger cameras, the small form factor smart phone cameras are nice.
What I really should do, and might do after writing this is trying and balance the notification messages. reduce them to have no context at all, hopefully I wont accidentally read them.
But the real problem is once I have a problem on my mind it bugs me to I solve it. It takes over my thought processes and annoys me, and when this happens while I'm out on a stroll or out for dinner, I'll spend the rest of the evening thinking about it.
It takes just one significant person in your life, who lives outside your range of unlimited-call phone plans, for this to be a serious argument in favour of using a smartphone.
[1] At the cost of a data plan which also takes care of internet needs.
(Edit: Grammar)
So now I can go for a walk/bike ride/drive and be off the grid for an hour or two, but I'm never far from a wifi network if I need it. I also save a lot of money each month.
To me, this is the best of both worlds.
Republic's upcoming Moto G (April availability) looks ideal for me as a basic smartphone.
Most dumbphones sold now seem designed to urge owners toward smartphones. They're thick (an inch?!), the UX is stupid (staring at Verizon), syncing with anything is a hassle, and include other features as bullet points but barely useable.
They should be very thin (less than an iPhone 5), small as practical for holding, elegant attention-to-detail calling nuances, auto-sync with other devices where appropriate, and anything else it does should be limited and excellent. Voice dialing should be of high quality/accuracy. When on a call, should still show the time. There's a host of other nitpicky things that most phones suck at but are overlooked as the norm and no viable alternatives.
If I'm carrying around a tablet, why bother carrying a phone which is nothing more than the same thing shrunk? I'd rather a phone which is an excellent phone, and is aware of & connected with the other devices I'm around much of the day.
Why? Because the constant checking my phone was starting to get counter-productive. Working and typing for a phone does not provide a wholly dedicated experience.
At concerts, shows, events, etc. I started to take notice in the last years how everyone hunched into their phones instead of enjoying what was going on.
We are simple beings and can only experience so much - having constant feeds of information erodes your mind. It takes years but this will be a hot topic in the coming years.
When I lived at home 15 years ago my mother would taunt me "Get away from the computer some more" - Now I have to taunt her to put away her smartphone/facebook when I'm visiting her. The late majority of phone-users need to learn to control themselves.
my 2 cents.
For the lack of a better word, it's perfect. It can use it to talk to people and send SMS messages, which is precisely what I need a phone for. E-mail and Facebook happens on my workstation (or on my laptop if I'm away); I am a programmer though, which means that at least one computer is bound to be on in my home at any given moment. Work e-mail happens only on my work computer, and anything work related happens during work hours. I'm paid to worry about work for exactly eight hours of day, after those eight hours are gone they can stick it.
I also get a good week of battery life (to the point that I actually end up frantically searching for the damned charger because I misplace it). No updates break my phone, because there aren't any. I can also write an SMS without developing arthritis. The only thing I'd upgrade it to is a dumbphone with QWERTY keyboard. I've had it for about two years. Prior to that I was using a Nokia 1100 whose charger broke at a time when they weren't so easily available outside E-Bay and the like and I decided it's really not worth it. The small SMS limit was also bugging me (I had room for 50 messages or so and I'd regularly forget to clear them up).
As for the "always connected" part, I really think part of it self-inflicted. I've had e-mail and IM clients with sound alerts, on broadband (or at least permanent) Internet connections for far longer than smartphones have been around. If I hear the e-mail chime and don't feel like checking my e-mail, I don't check it. I know the poor guy at the other end of the line can't see I'm reading and therefore can't answer his e-mail, but hey, it's the risk of remote communication. Facebook chat alert while I'm in the shower? I finish showering, then check it. This isn't really that a big deal. My friends know that if something is urgent, they can reach me on the phone at any hour of day or night.
I know "society is offended" nowadays if you don't answer their IMs immediately, but I'm really not friends with all society, only with a handful of people (which is why my Facebook friend list also has, well, a handful of people!)
To clarify, I haven't yet completely made the switch to a "dumbphone", but I'm getting there I think. I currently own the absolutely phenomenal, yet to-the-point, Nokia Lumia 520. Next step is something much more rudimentary.
The reason both exist is because a big screen is great but it doesn't fit in your pocket (and it looks dumb when you hold it to your ear)
http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/wireless/detail-page/mo...
About as small of an attack surface as a GSM device can have, I think.
IMO it makes it a much more enjoyable experience and I never feel like im tied to my phone.
Often they are the arty type who try to stand out from the crowd even though they have a nicely intellectual justification "I'm get too distracted, I lose out on quality of life". The cynic in me thinks they just want to be different.
If anything, it would be nice to own a smartphone so my friends and colleagues will stop acting weird about it.
Most of the "arty" types you see probably just can't afford one. As someone who over the years has lost their phone a couple times and dropped it many more times, no way am I going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a new one every time that happens.
I also don't own a smartphone because I already spend enough time at my computer, and doing all the same things on a tiny screen with no mouse/keyboard/etc. would feel like a massively downgraded experience.
For me, the only appealing features of a smart phone are tethering and GPS. I'm fine without them though. I moved to a new city ~6 months ago, and I already know my way around much better than most (especially useful because most of the city is not well documented on Google Maps / OpenStreetMap). Probably would not be the case if I had GPS everywhere.
"the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40… …as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal…
…someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly..."
…People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
… Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you.
- http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
This topic is very fertile for insight, personal or general. Most people would probably figure something out if they started writing about it. I think the crux is that surprisingly little of what we do is deliberate, and underexamined. Your choice of university or job might have been a grand crossroads choice that you made deliberately but many more choices are not. Impactfulness isn't really the trigger for deliberation in most cases, immediate commitment is. Choosing one book over another only impacts a few hours and a few dollars. A decade of book choices affects your personality, the things you think about and the way you talk.
Many of our major maladies and deficiencies are related these undeliberate choices. I agree with PG on his insights about technology and "accelerating addictiveness" and the distillation of less addictive predecessors." Even more insightful is the idea that we can't rely on society and culture to guide us in the right direction concerning new things.
That's probably where these dumbphone people are coming from. Sensing that there are cumulative bad choices related to carrying around a smartphone and making a deliberate choice to avoid them.
The experience is painful enough, that I don't treat it like a toy and hence feel no compulsion to baby it in my hand all of the time.
Sometimes I feel like I miss out on all the apps and general development in the area, but that hasn't gotten acute enough yet for me to get a smartphone.
It's amazing how everyone around me was constantly looking at their phone all the fucking time. From my technology-hipster POV, it was easy to see how people were missing out on, or just plain ignoring where used to be common social interactions.
Then I got a bloody iPhone as an xmas gift. I've done my best to resist but... I don't think I could go back.
I still have the common courtesy to not bust out the phone when other people are in the room, but I've lost count the times Google Maps has saved my ass, or having a distraction has saved me from hours of boredom.
I think people forgot how to find balance between having the intorwebs in one's pocket, and not being an asshole.
Currently the only apps I use (99% of the time) on my smartphone are - * Contacts, * Camera, * Email, * Maps. In that order.
Confession:
When smartphones had just hit the scene, I would stuff mine with new and shiny apps all night long, but in the long run, none of them stuck around.
Cheap time waster games are also nice, and there seem to be niche apps where people that need them really benefit.
Here's one of the few jokes I ever came up with:
Q: What do you do if you want to find out whether somebody owns a tv? A: Nothing. If they don't have one, they'll tell you.
Your joke is a good variation on "how can you tell if someone is vegan?"
The important thing is what you are doing with the newly discovered free time.
I'd like to point out that that phone [1] can browse the web (using Opera Mini Brew), can install apps and games (using the Samsung Brew store) and can be used to listen to music via a common 3.5mm jack (even though it only has 128MB of storage). It even has A-GPS.
"Dumbphones" have not been dumb for at least 10 years.
It is also interesting to me that many of the folks in the article admit it's not a problem with smartphones, but rather their own shortcomings--they can't not be distracted.
On the other hand a smartphone is expensive, you always risk breaking it/getting it stolen. Nobody will bother stealing my 20euros Samsung and if I get it gets destroyed I'll just buy a couple more. Oh and as TFA mentions the battery lasts for like 10 days of normal use.
The irony is that my job involves porting Android to embedded devices.
But of course at time goes buy the low end phones get more and more featureful. That being said I doubt the Moto G has 10 days battery life and is as solid as my current brick phone.
Still, it's a good recommendation, I'll look into it when my current phone stops working.
I do grimace more when I drop it onto a stone floor, but it has already survived that once.
In my case, I was mostly after navigation and good calendar sync, plus I was getting tired of T9 for countless texts.
AFTER 40 years of mobile telephones, a Nokia with a broken screen has been declared the greatest ever.
Experts described the battered 2003 phone as ‘not taking any shit’, and ‘the only phone you’ve ever wanted to have a pint with’.
Telecoms analyst Martin Bishop said: “It’s got buttons, a speaker, the game ‘Snake’ plus you can drive a Panzer tank over the fucker and it still works.
really? my n95 has wifi, gps(although hard to get satellite), 5mp camera with flash. Symbian OS was the thing back in the day. People were using the camera's gyroscope to do a lot of cool stuff. I've seen videos of people controlling RC Cars with the gyroscope. I also have python installed in it. Granted it takes a long time to type, but I sometimes open up the interpreter and use the math library!
The features and abilities provided aren't worth a thousand a year to me, the loss of freedom certainly isn't.
1) 4G+Tethering 2) Contacts Sync 3) Maps/Nav 4) Email/SMS
It could even have a small screen and physical keypad. I don't think any such phone exists, but it would be an interesting exercise to chop down android to those elements.
If we're moving towards wearables, I imagine that many narrow use cases might move towards watches, etc, that seem like tethered devices anyways.
If you want something made in the last couple of years, Nokia's Asha line of phones would probably work, though I don't know if Google ever made a version of maps to work with s40-based devices.
(Here and Here.com are their current brand for it, I think the purchase of NAVTEQ was a big piece of their puzzle)
I currently have an old POS dumbphone, my first one since ~2006. I will get rid of it in the coming months.
The convenience factor is not high enough to justify the cost, inconvenience of work calling whenever they want and the hit to my conventional skills.
Going to a bar where everyone has their smartphone on the table and checks it every 3 minutes is painful.
You only get 100 minutes but you also get unlimited talk, text, and data at 4G speeds up to 5 gigs.
It's... okay.
The reception can be truly appalling around Palo Alto.
I used to have a dumbphone and the 10 cents per minute plan but it's hard to be a young adult without Google Maps.
Besides the advantages others listed, I simply like the smaller size of it. It fits in my pocket without being annoying.
I also wear a wristwatch. Gosh, I'm old!
With a watch, I can read the time in 1/10 of a second, I don't have to dig it out of my pocket and turn it on, I can surreptitiously check the time, I can read it without my glasses on, I can read it out of the corner of my eye, it doesn't bounce around annoyingly in my pocket when I jog, it lasts a year on a charge, it works on an airplane, I can read it when my hands are full, I can check the time without taking my hands off the steering wheel, it works in the rain, etc.
The only thing I don't like about a watch is I have to remember to take it off when working with rotating machinery.
Occasionally I switch the radio on and see if I have any messages or voicemail.
It also has every variant of Angry Birds. Bad piggies to kill, you understand.
That's actually the second best part. The best is that I can use it as a dial-up modem should the need ever arise. I'll probably never need it, but I still think it's awesome.
However my primary telecommunications device is a cheap flip phone.
In any system, there are always outliers. This is just one of them.
I want to try this out without switching permanently.
( ...for the downvote-no-bad-humor-allowed-HNers - I can take it :) )
[ edit: for the downvoters - no, I can't really take it - stop - for the love of my very small amount of karma ]
Huh?
I whip it out, flip it open, and before I can ask Scotty to beam me up --
Ooohh!