This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Not at all. It's really hard to live without the practical features of a smartphone, like web browsing and maps. What I need is privacy, not to throw it all away for a dumbphone.
I believe a lot of the benefits you claim dumbphones provide are all caused by abandoning social media. There's nothing wrong with technology, it's just social media. You don't need to use a dumbphone just to escape social media.
I simply wouldn't. A dumbphone does mostly the things I don't use a phone for.
And I don't mean fortnite and tickytocks, I've grown up through (most) of the history of mobile phones, I started with my mothers old Nokia 2110 back in like... 1998? I remember how awesome it was to finally have a phone, then to be able to get the bus schedules with the painfully slow WAP connection so I didn't have to call home, then to have navigation, replace the mp3 player, camera, and eventually even mostly my laptop.
I want to have a datapad with access to all the devices and information in my pocket at all times. If I need it to do something, I know there's an app for it probably. It's awesome.
I'd really prefer that the datapad wouldn't then leech all of my information in return, though.
Oh, and bring back physical keyboards. I'd give my left nut for an HTC Desire Z with 2025 hardware.
I’ve lived through the cell phone invention, to flip phones, to smartphones. They were terrible back then and I doubt that’s changed now.
Now, I do understand the reason why you moved back to one. For me, I just got aggressive about notifications and turned off most of them. I stopped social media tied to friends and family and am selective about what I’m on and for how long. Takes more personal willpower (or whatever) but you do get used to it in the long run and feel better.
Doesn't really make much sense for me to switch to a flip phone unless it was specifically built for privacy/security. SMS and regular voice calls are insecure, it likely could connect to fake cell towers uninhibited, it likely doesn't have hardware switches to disconnect various features e.g. modem, microphone, or camera.
All of that, plus the benefits of having a good pocket camera to carry around - spontaneous photography is my thing and having a good camera phone solves that equation nicely.
And before anyone says "get a real camera", I have real cameras and there's no way they can be carried in my pocket the same way a smartphone does lol. That and the smaller they get, the further image quality worsens to the point where you might just use a (good camera) phone instead.
I grew up with dumb phones, and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to using them - they suck!
My job, mostly.
I use Uptime Robot to tell me if anything goes wrong, and I need to be able to VPN into my work network and restart services if they go down. A flip phone can’t do that.
MFA is the biggest hurdle. I literally could not do my job without it.
Any decent password manager should handle generating TOTP codes. A phone is not needed for that.
No way. Life is way better with smart phones. Tap to pay, maps, always having a camera, always having my notes, working as a mobile hotspot, controlling my home security system. 25 other things.
This stuff used to be so much harder. I’m not going back.
I will freely admit there are some dangerous addictive and invasive aspects to it also. I’m ruthless about what apps I will grant permissions to. And I don’t browse the App Store getting tempted by their promises.
I think the appeal of our phones not having to be a computer and not needing all the same rigor and paranoia and extra steps of a computer was really exciting. But it hasn’t turned out to be true. So now I treat it like a computer and approach everything with that level of skepticism. And also treat it like the gateway to capitalism that it is and I am skeptical of anything that’s trying to take my data or money. I think with the right attitude it’s a net positive device in my life
treating your phone like a computer definitely is the way to go. because it is!
my Vivo X100s Pro is a magnitude more powerful than the first hands-me-down laptop I have.
All my parking meters require an app, and all of my work logins require pressing a confirmation in an app.
The apps 100%
you couldn't pay me to go backwards in time, sorry!
see I was around before the age of the smartphone. growing up, I thought my cassette Walkman was the most revolutionary thing ever. and when PDAs were new, I would dreaammm about everything being on one electronic device.
smart phones have given me a freedom that younger me never had.
i no longer need to carry a notebook/memobook around, because I have powerful software on my phone that not only let's me note-take, but index and SEARCH my own notes. from my pocket.
i don't need to carry the 3 novels im reading at the moment because they're on the ereader app in my pocket.
contacts, games, all my news sources, photos, videos, all my media.
to me, this is still revolutionary tech and it has only improved my life
i think we are seeing a rise now of adults who were raises as iPad kids who never had to carry all their shit around the way us older individuals have. so they naturally would want to get away from it because they've known no different and they never had to live another way before that point.
its an understandable mentality from that one standpoint. but no, I will never give up my smart phone. i understand the reasons for those that do, but some of us don't really want to go backwards.
I personally dont think you need to switch to a dumb phone to get those benefits, smartphones themselves arent what's causing issues its what you're using. You want less distraction just stop using those apps or turn off push notifications.
I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective.
I started on a privacy journey because I didn't like that I'm being tracked (by basically everybody) and feel that the technology that I pay for should be service to me, not me as a service to it (and its related parties).
Anyways, along the way I did a few things. Namely, I turned off mail notifications (this was an inadvertent feature since my mail service couldn't send notifications without google services that I removed). I also removed my sim and use data only via a hotspot, to which I don't always have on. These sound like crazy things, and admittedly they aren't for everyone, but the resulting mental shifts are exactly to this point.
Just because I have a device that let's me be available to anybody in any place at any time, doesn't mean I should be, or even need to be, available unless I want to be.
Now I protect my time, and the mental clarity that comes with it. I never was a doom scroller, but even now that concept is even more reduced. The phone is my tool, and I use when needed.
I can very much agree with this. Like getting rid of Instagram and Tiktok has done a lot to help time not disappear in the same way.
Yeah, alongside that. Phones also have focus mode, digital wellbeing to limit usage of distracting apps. You can even turn on super power saving mode to limit phone use further and use it for basic functions like phones, messages, web browsing, etc.
I really hate when people are like “just stop” like everyone has impeccable self control and executive function.
What self control? Just delete the app and find a different addiction. Right now I'm on Lemmy 😜
Agreed. Also, there are important applications that I wouldn't do without. Like Google Maps, my Garmin watch app, My security camera app.
Who even makes phone calls today? Not me. I need a device that does everything but phone calls more than I need a device that only does voice.
Speaking as someone who never has carried a smartphone, there are a bunch of tradeoffs. I do my banking in person, for instance, and that can be mildly inconvenient. I don't take a lot of photographs (when I do, I use an old-style single-purpose camera). "Portable media" is a CD player, and I carry a paperback book if I think I might have to wait somewhere for more than ten minutes or so. And so on. Just continuing to live the same way as I did a quarter-century ago.
I expect, however, that it's a lot easier not to miss what you never had in the first place.
2FA app. 2FA via SMS is incredibly insecure.
Map and translation apps a close second.
Please tell my bank this ;-;
Yes, please tell my bank and doctors’ office. Thank you.
There is nothing about those that can’t run on KaiOS, which comes with Google maps and runs on most dumb phones on the market today.
There's a terminology issue here, feature phones run apps, flip phones and true dumb phones shouldn't run apps or have any data connections. But it seems more common now to draw the line at Smartphone and anything else is "dumb" even if it's basically just a 2008 smartphone.
I don't use the phone part of my smartphone much, so thie idea of a dumbphone has no real appeal for me.
I don't like talking to people.
Camera is probably the first obstacle. I've got a kid, and I really want to have good documentation of her growing up. If there were a dumbphone with a legit camera, that'd be a big deal for me.
After that, probably maps is the next most important thing that I want an actual smart phone for. I remember getting my first smart phone, and probably the main thing I was excited about was always being able to navigate directly to where I wanted to go.
Almost everything else is tertiary to my needs.
I highly recommend just getting a real camera. The pictures I took with my camera 11 years ago are still better quality than an iPhone can manage today. Modern cameras are far far better.
But then I start to feel like
this guy, with the "real" camera and the phone camera, but the phone camera is the one I've most consistently got on me, because I can't lug a whole additional piece of hardware around in a camera bag, meanwhile the phone camera pictures are grainy and shitty, and I'd just as soon have a Pixel in my pocket at all times that can take fairly good pictures at all times.
Fair enough, though modern cameras are much smaller:
Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:
I could drop lemmy from mobile because it's just a time waster and news source.
Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don't need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.
Games are nice. I don't want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it's 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn't fit in my pocket.
I don't have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don't find it much of a distraction.
Not having a private OS and messaging.
The best option as of now is the Punkt phone
Pretty much nothing i use my phone for can be done on a flip phone. Smartphone is no distraction for me - I just use it when I need it to do something for me.
maps - occasionally GPS.
mp3 player
mp4s watching on long train / bus rides or when camping.
large sd card (500gb)
memrise/ language learning app.
occasionally guitar tuner
occasionally internet is useful for checking events, buying tickets, checking for hotels and stuff.
occasionally checking emails.
occasionally playing mindustry (when i want my battery to die).
I don't carry a laptop most of the time that i'd need for most of that stuff above. TBH - I can't use many other apps anyway because I don't want GPS or microG installed - so I'm mostly just f-droid apps.
Edit - i'd also prefer something like simpleX to SMS, but I don't actually know anyone else who uses it - so not an issue really. I just have to SMS.
