revisiting the dumb phone
I wrote a post last year about choosing a dumb phone where I talked about swapping out my smart phone for an old Google Nexus 5. The Nexus 5 was released in 2013, so certainly a dumb phone by modern standards!
I wanted to try it as an experiment, to see if I could change the way I used my phone, having succumbed to the compulsive habits that smartphones are designed to conduce. The idea was that only a radical change could alter that relationship. Well, I tried and I failed, and I tried again and I failed again, and now I'm trying a third time, which has been going a lot better.
My first two dumb phones just weren't reliable enough. The Nexus 5, as much as I love it, had terrible battery life. Even if I only used it a few times a day for making phone calls and sending texts, the battery would have drained completely by the evening. No good.
So, I decided to try a real brick phone - the Nokia 150. I actually really liked switching to such a basic phone, but the 150 doesn't even support 4G and so the audio quality for phone calls was appalling. If I was in a noisy environment, I could barely hear what my caller was saying.
Now, I'm using a Nokia 2660 flip phone. Great battery life - I only need to charge it once a week - and good audio quality too. It also comes with a few modern features - a (very) basic browser, torch, and retro games (Snake!) This one has lasted much better than the others and feels like it might go the distance.
But, hardware aside, the hard truth I've learned through this experiment is that modern life without a smart phone is very difficult indeed. If you want to abandon your smart phone completely, you need to be extremely committed. It's not because smartphones are too distracting. It's because everything nowadays is so intertwined with mobile devices. For example, my online banking, access to the gym, and my printer are all set up as apps on my phone. Same goes for buying train tickets, booking doctor's appointments, and so on. And then, of course, there's WhatsApp, which has now become the primary mode of communication for virtually everyone I know.
So, I've had to change my approach. I still use my smartphone for some things, but I treat it more like a kind of supplementary device than a phone. I switch it off when I'm not using it. And it turns out that, most of the time, I can check everything I need using my laptop, including WhatsApp.
Which is to say that I've started to use my smartphone instrumentally, for particular tasks, not as a means of consumption. I expect that, in time, I'll be able to gradually reduce the dependency on the smartphone, shifting away from it as a necessity. But it feels unlikely that I'll be able to fully expel it from my daily life any time soon.