There’s been this trend. One that some friends have suggested I join onto. One that I want to talk about. And that’s the trend of ditching your smartphone and going back to the good ‘ol days of dumbphones that don’t have to do everything under the sun. As a way of disconnecting from the lifestyle of being terminally online.
On the surface, it sounds kinda good! I do enjoy the days of old dumbphones, back when they came in all sorts of shapes, form factors, and colors. Want to text via T9? Cool beans, there’s phones for you. Want a keyboard? Great, there’s also phones for you! Want your choice of form factors, like sliders, clamshells, or just the basic candybar? You’ve got options in spades.
Those are the halcyon days I wouldn’t mind going back to. I glance over at my (very dead) enV touch sitting on the shelf, and long for the days of phones like that. I don’t miss how much of a mess text messaging was back then (threaded messaging was a huge godsend), but that form factor was so. friggin. cool. Even the weird placement of the space bar!
And thus we arrive at why I wouldn’t want to do this in 2024: The dumbphone landscape is…barren. Sure, they still exist, and you can even get them in flavors that work just fine on modern carriers! But they seem to be limited to two types: Flip, and candybar. No keyboards along for the ride. So the most basic of communication is going to have to be carried out on T9. Back in the day, I could jive with that. In 2024 and approaching my mid thirties? Yeah, right. The closest I could go to that is something like BlackBerry’s SureType, but that’s probably patented to hell and back and BlackBerry as a phone manufacturer is effectively defunct. We’re getting hardware like the Pearl/Pearl Flip effectively never.
(There’s also some flip phones that just cheat. They share the form factor, but really are just running an extra crappy version of Android underneath it all with a potato of a CPU powering it. These are just smartphones but pared down to fit in a form factor they were arguably never intended to fit.)
Though some might consider the forced use of T9 an advantage. I sure don’t. I like phone calls about as much as a slug likes the idea of going into a salt mine. If I can communicate with someone over text, I am going to very much prefer that option 99.99% of the time.
There’s also the convenience factor of not having to carry around multiple devices to do the same thing my phone can do well enough. My phone is my go-everywhere camera. Without it, I’d have to take my big-ass Nikon everywhere (Again, I know some would say this is an advantage, to live in the moment rather than capture it. But also…I’m an artist, and my camera is my paintbrush, and I’d hate to miss out on something that would make an amazing piece of art). I’d have to carry a camcorder to do video (and most camcorders can’t even hold a candle to the iPhone in video quality, not the cheaper ones, anyway). Apple Pay is something I use the absolute hell out of, too (and you should too, as it obscures your card number from merchants).
For me, personally, there’s also the autistic introvert factor. I have few real-life friends (and those that I do have generally live kinda far away, and given that my rent doubled this year, I’m not exactly flush with cash to go see them) but many friends across the country and in other countries, too. You know how I talk to those people? Through phone apps. Like Discord. Like Telegram. It’s nice to be able to chat with those people whenever, wherever. Because as an autistic, it’s just imperative to have Your People. The people that are on the same page as you.
Lastly, there’s the carrier factor: I’m on Verizon via Visible at this writing, and US carriers (sans T-Mobile, I think) tend to have a whitelist of devices that’ll work on their network, and a LOT of these dumbphones aren’t exactly good to go on most networks outside T-Mobile. They’ve gotta support VoLTE at a minimum, and since all the networks where I live are prioritizing the hell out of 5G (to the point where even phone calls suffer on LTE), from a networking point of view it feels like you’re at a severe disadvantage.
Worse yet, I’m on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. That doesn’t have a SIM slot, anymore. So to move my service onto a physical SIM card would take a matter of days while I wait for the physical SIM to arrive from Visible. Visible moves your service to the new card before it even ships, so that would leave me completely without cellular service for a few days. Again, some might say this is fine, you can go a few days without your phone! But knowing one’s luck, something catastrophic is gonna happen in that timeframe.
(I really wish Apple hadn’t axed the SIM slot. I really do.)
I could continue droning on, but I think you get why I, at least, don’t really want to partake of this trend. If we started getting dumbphones that were as cool and expressive as the ones we had before smartphones took over, the siren song of them would be so hard to resist. I’d do questionable things for a modern dumbphone variant of a Pearl Flip with the not-quite-T9 keyboard. Or something out of left field like the LG Lotus. Something that sits comfortably between a smartphone and a super-basic dumbphone like those phones of old used to do.
Then they’d be worth the risk of me having to do the whole SIM-switching song and dance with Visible.