daisyblog

Like many people these days, and on-tend with my other posts here, I've been rethinking my digital life and how I manage it with my devices. I've posted repeatedly about ditching most social media in favor of the fediverse, and lately I've been considering that I might have a slight case of device addiction besides, losing hours each day to my phone sometimes. It's not just social media vying for every smidgeon of synaptic energy that can be milked from our brains! (Spoiler alert: it's capitalism and you can't escape it by ditching your smart device, though it might help a little.)

So I thought, as so many of us do, “What if I just got a dumb phone instead?” So I started imagining my life in this way. What exactly do I actually need from my phone? It turns out, a lot! I do banking, healthcare, I use GPS, I have multiple messaging apps like Telegram, Discord, and Signal, I have my shopping like Etsy and eBay. I do a lot of things on my phone each day, a lot of things I maybe ought to be doing on a computer.

It's true that my phone has saved my ass once or twice. One time I left my wallet at work right before going to get my hair cut. I couldn't pay my stylist, so I used my phone to pay her with Zelle right from my banking app. Phew! Crisis averted. But what if I hadn't had my phone? Or I had a dumb phone? We might have had to revert to the ways of the Before Times, such as the honor system, me simply asking my stylist to please trust me while I run to work and retrieve my wallet, or promise to pay her on Zelle from my computer when I get home. Maybe I would leave something with her for collateral so she'd know I was serious. Almost all problems have solutions, even if they're not great ones or the preferred ones.

Another time, I was visiting the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. We were away from home so we couldn't easily print the tickets, so I used my phone to show the e Ticket email, but the e Tickets wouldn't scan. So the worker suggested I pull up the website, which I did, but the website wanted to open the e Ticket as a PDF. I had already removed my PDF reader as part of my phone decluttering project, so I had to redownload it on the spot so we could open the eTicket. It worked, but without my smart phone I would have been in a pickle.

Then there's things like 2 factor authentication. If it's just a text code, no big deal, a dumb phone will deal with that easily. But sometimes it's a web link. When I tried to install CashApp on my tablet (which I'll get to in a second), it requires 2FA with a text, BUT the link in the text threw an error if opened on a device other than the one you are trying to install the app on. So I had to send it to myself in telegram & open it from my tablet that way. It was.... a choice. The app is clearly intended to be only used on a smart PHONE, or at least a smart device in a phone plan. I might have had to simply opt out of CashApp if I hadn't had a smart phone still.

So given that there are so many things the phone or smart device is useful for, I decided I would try getting a tablet before simply throwing my phone into the sea. I looked for the smallest current tablet available and after ruling out the Amazon 8” tablet (which was the size I wanted but fuck Amazon) and my local BestBuy not having a Samsung A7 Lite available to sample, I settled on the Lenovo M9, a 9” Android tablet that cost me about $140. It's extremely lightweight, I can hold it fairly easily with one hand despite it being just a bit too wide to grasp around the sides comfortably. It fits in my smallest bag, a tiny backpack style purse bag, & it has some nice features that my phone actually doesn't (I really enjoy Reading Mode for example).

My thinking was, if I'm going to give up carrying a smart phone, it might be useful to have a smart device for backup that I could use on public Wifi if really necessary, rather than being connected with cell data at all times, while just having a basic feature phone for calls and texts. (I could also use my disconnected smart phone as a tiny tablet, which I may still do, though I have other projects in mind for that.) Seems like a reasonable compromise! Right? So while some reviews had complaints about this tablet, like its screen's slow responsiveness at times, it really hasn't been a problem for me. I realized I just probably don't need to carry around a perfect tiny computer in my pocket when I have a perfectly adequate laptop at home. I just need something that will get the job done when I need to send a telegram message while I'm out or use my bank app for some reason. It doesn't need to be lightning fast or have a stunning display quality, and this tabby is just fine for that! Honestly, I rarely even notice the deficiencies when compared to my phone, except that it has much more limited memory, which means I have to not carefully manage how many apps I keep running at the same time. (It does have a cute feature where when you "close all apps," it tells you how much memory was freed in doing so. Nice! Now Telegram can load new messages!)

Since then, I've slowly began paring down my smart phone experience. I wanted to try to make my phone as minimalist and disconnected as possible, to see if I really can handle the dumb phone life after all these years of living with smart device brainworms. Right now my home screen has the clock displaying the time, my phone app, SMS app, and settings app. Swiping up to show all apps gives half a page of folders with just a few apps inside. That collection gets smaller and smaller as I replace the functionality on my phone with my tablet, and honestly I hardly use my phone anymore. It doesn't distract me much when I use it because there's so little on the home screen, and if I even want to use the browser I have to go to All Apps, open the folder it's in and start it up. The extra steps remind me that I can do the same thing with a bigger screen by just using my tablet instead. Which makes me ask myself, “Do I really need to be doing this right now anyway? Is it worth pulling my tablet out at this moment? Can't I just do it later?” It gives me time for that thought process to happen, versus when everything is just already sitting right there on the home screen when you open up your phone. And anyway, much of the time, I don't end up doing it later. I forget what I was trying to do in the first place, because it really wasn't very important. The important things, I can get back to and finish on a proper device. This has so far not cost me any extraordinary loss in the form of a long-forgotten Firefox tab that would have fixed my life if only I had simply finished perusing it on my phone.

I also have been checking periodically how much mobile data I've used on my phone, because hey, maybe if I switch over to a dumb phone with a limited data plan, I'll realize what I'm now missing, which is the ability to continue guzzling gigabytes of data at all times. However when I used data targeting/hotspot to connect my tablet when I've has no other way to connect, my maximum data usage in the past 3 months has been just over 700MB. That's an M, MEGAbytes. Not even one Gigabyte of data used in a month since I started pretending my smart phone is a dumb phone, and when i don't use tethering it floats around 150MB. That's pretty amazing and completely blew my mind, as most plans center around unlimited data usage and the ones that don't generally start at 10-15 GB.

This all begs the question: if you can just choose to simplify your smart phone environment, does anyone need a dumb phone to deal with their device addiction/overstimulation/distraction/etc? I've seen a lot of people, in the form of Reddit posts, articles, and even comments at the bottom of articles, suggesting that you don't need to switch devices if you just choose to control yourself a bit, you filthy animal. Have some discipline! Have some self respect! Meditate multiple times a day! If you can't do that with your current device, you are just weak! (People are actually saying shit like this, can you believe it?)

Besides being a bizarre way to relate to your fellow humans, it fails to consider the fact that the modern smartphone ecosystems and the apps that are made for them are carefully designed to suck up your attention and waste your time (and I struggle to believe any of the  “digital wellness” features are seriously intended to provide real solutions, though they can help somewhat if that's your only option). Or the fact that our primitive brains have not evolved to function properly in our modern environment, being battered with distractions, suggestions, demands for attention, time, and money, and bright lights shining into our eyeballs at all hours of the day. Many people simply can't say no to the sweet hit of dopamine we get from opening up social media and just seein' what all the little gay commies that live in our phones are up to today. Maybe we'll even catch some breaking news before our buddies do! What fun.

So I think the obvious answer is: it depends! Some people might be fine turning on some settings, decluttering their interface, and calling it good. That will not work for everyone though. I never could be stopped by app time limits for example. I just turn them off. I am not a baby child, I do not need a curfew, MOM. But the Bedtime Mode feature that turns my phone totally grayscale, plus the blue light filter, help in making my screen a bit less engaging & interesting, which helps me wind down at night. The Reading Mode on the tablet does something similar, but I can choose either total grayscale or what they call Chromatic Effect, which keeps the colors but super desaturates them so it's almost-but-not-quite grayscale. However, when I am engaged in something that requires discerning between colors (such as looking at art or shopping), I often simply turn these settings off, which can throw off the whole process. I suppose the next step then would be to remove the buttons which toggle these modes on and off from my top menu, forcing me to fight through my settings app to turn off Bedtime Mode, which could have a slight deterrent effect. But that's kind of the point: all of the available measures most people have to curb their device usage relies on trusting themselves to simply not do the thing they're trying not to do, but when all that's standing between you and your addictive digital habits is tapping one button on your screen, or navigating through your settings to turn off a feature, you are very likely to thwart your own best efforts. Some folks simply would do better with a hard obstacle, like a device that is all but incapable of browsing or using apps.

There's another aspect of dumb phones that has always really appealed to certain folks, which is the tactile aspect. It was one of the big complaints when smartphones became a thing actually, and is now finally coming to the conversation about tech in cars: lots of people actually LIKE and NEED to have buttons to push and get physical feedback from their device. It brings them joy and helps them feel connected to physical reality (whereas digital living with minimal tactile engagement can trigger or deepen feelings of dissociation, and probably just has no place in the operation of heavy machinery). So if the prospect of a minimalistic phone device with physical buttons to press appeals to certain people, what's the problem?

Well, for me what the first problem is, is the shear lack of viable options. Many people just want the Y2K aesthetic with smartphone functionality; they want their GPS, their Spotify, Whatsapp, etc. Plenty of others just really want a basic device that makes calls and sends texts, ADEQUATELY. Unfortunately, because feature phones are considered trash phones for kids and old people who simply cannot operate a “real phone” rather than a legitimate choice any reasonable human being would make, neither of these camps get what they want. For some reason, nobody is making feature phones with a reasonable interface, with acceptable texting features (apparently KaiOS, which most modern feature phones use, reworked their T9 system and are using what's called KikaT9 which everyone seems to think SUCKS, has a limited dictionary which new words cannot be added to, and the “4” key defaults to “G” instead of “I,” which is the main letter on that key which will be used on its own and absolutely should be the assumed default for any sensible designer of a device with an interface aimed at an English-speaking consumer base (which we would assume it is, when the interface is in English). Many of these devices can't handle group messages or messages with media attachments for some reason. You've got problems with the contacts functions. So you've got people trying to operate a device on the 3G or even 2G networks, because nobody has duplicated their favorite dumb phone since 2007, and many carriers are not even accepting these devices anymore and are (rightfully enough) sunsetting these older networks entirely.

On the other side, the people who want more functionality, essentially a smart phone with buttons, can also get fucked. The main contender here seems to be KaiOS, followed by AOSP (Android). Apparently KaiOS itself SUCKS and has several shortcomings, namely that for the minimalist people these devices often come with distracting software like Facebook and YouTube which can't be uninstalled, and for the aesthetics people these apps lack the streamlined functionality they are looking for. (Facebook is also now sunsetting its support for Whatsapp on these devices, so they won't be getting that anymore either, which is often a primary reason people choose these phones.) Either way, it seems that AOSP is the slightly preferred option, though both have certain limitations.

And then … you've got the companies attempting to capitalize on or at least tap into the recent trend towards retro and flip phones and “digital minimalism.” Light Phone seems a little gimmicky, not a device for people who only need basic functionality but for people who are trying to make a statement out of basic functionality (to themselves as well as the world). It seems like people who buy Light Phones are people who are already balls deep in device addiction and THINK they want a completely minimal distraction-free device, who then find the experience uncomfortable & switch back to their smart device but delete some of the more problematic apps. Punkt Phone seems similar: an extremely minimal device with very nice aesthetics and thoughtful features, going at $300 for the MP02. I don't know anyone who has tried this phone, because it seems like a whole lot of money for a very minimal device. I get it, R&D costs money, design costs money, manufacturing costs money. But those facts are just probably not going to sell a candybar phone or $300. Don't even talk to me about all these touchscreen “flip phones” like Zflip or whatever. As far as I can tell no one wants these phones. This is never what people are hoping to find when they search “flip phone” on their carrier website, but is what people who DON'T want and aren't seeking a dumb flip phone buy because it's kinda weird & neat and everyone is selling them now for some reason. People I've spoken to who own one seem kind of amused by their device, and happy to have a bigger screen without just carrying a tablet, but with some minor complaints about the effectiveness of the touch screen in the folding areas. They saw it among the newly offered SMART PHONES (which they were definitely shopping for), and decided to try it out. These devices just completely miss the mark in my opinion, as they don't seem to have a coherent use case or target audience, and every time I see this nonsense online like “Flip phones are BACK, babyy!” and then it's THIS FUCKING PHONE I want to scream because this is NOT what people who want FLIP PHONES are looking for!! It's just goofy & bad marketing and that's not who's buying these phones.

I want to enter an era where instead of two companies dumping money into pressuring carriers to hock their 12 nearly identical devices, we have a number of actual choices for people with different needs and desires from a device. It shouldn't be this technical. We should at least have a few flip phones and candy bar phones that function well on a minimal level, a few dumb phones that function adequately at a slightly techier level but still have buttons, & then we should have some smart phones and very small tablets (I'm addition to the monsters tablets we already have, which are practically laptops but without keyboards and with shitty memory). Why is this an impossible ask? Why are the normal phones we've had for nearly 40 years still manufactured to be shitty as if they're a punishment instead of a legitimate option?

One option that looks pretty good is Sunbeam F1. These are actually flip phones as in clamshell phones with buttons, with various versions of pared down functionality and a rugged option. Lots of people seem to love this phone, however it is very expensive, around $250 for the “budget friendly” version. That's a lot to pay for a flip phone, but for the exact right balance of features and aesthetic plus food build quality and reliability, a lot of folks seem to find it worth it. They're slightly adjacent to the "Kosher phone" scene, where people with certain religious beliefs (mostly certain Jewish faiths, hence the name) buy very basic phones to avoid exactly the kinds of temptations and soul-sucking effects of having the internet in your pocket everywhere you go. (Go figure, they're onto something!) I love that this is a thing honestly, and there are a number of companies making these phones.

I however ended up settling on a TCL Flip Go. It gets pretty decent reviews, is very reasonably priced, seems to be running AOSP with minimal app capabilities, and has mobile tethering, so I bought one used on eBay. I'm planning to hook it up to Mint Mobile on the cheapest, lowest data plan possible, and see what happens. I'll probably be leaving my smart phone at home for a while, taking just my tablet when I'm out.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to return to setting up a Misskey server on my Raspberry Pi with all this time I have since kicking my device addiction.