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I’d Love a Dumb Phone, But (kevquirk.com)
4 points by _xivi on Aug 18, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


I just got a piece of shit Nokia 2780 flip this week, which is essentially a "throw 'em in the deep-end" approach since I had a Google phone before. I thought I was gonna get a different phone from what I got but meh, they had it laying around at Wal-Mart. It was $40.

It has Google maps for navigation, and you can add an SD card. You can side-load music if you want. Wrt to the article contents, the "I don't have the time or inclination to manage my music library", and the limp blurb about the camera --

> There’s also the camera - I don’t use it often, but it’s nice to snap little memories here and there.

This is hilarious to me, because I have a strong distaste for pictures that only live on phones; most will die with the device from what I've seen. I take pictures all the time and send them to shutterfly or whatever it's called to get them printed, and I fully plan to continue doing that -- I'm rambling --

I remember feeling the same as the person who wrote this. To me, it's justifying the addiction to the device. I want music? I'll go download it. I want nicer pictures? I'll get a camera. The relief I already feel after three days with this terrible flip phone is absurd. We can wax poetic about the glories of self-control and discipline being the real deciding factors for whether or not we can deal with having an addiction screen in our every day lives, but the reality for me -- and for many other addicts like me -- is that we straight up cannot. I quit smoking cold turkey. I could not bring myself to put down the damned phone. That's how powerful that addiction was for me -- worse than nicotine.

What that means to me is that no matter how inconvenient this hunk of garbage might be, it's my saving grace, because I could not stave the addiction to my phone without it.

So yeah, I'll buy a camera. I'll download music. Whatever I've gotta do to get this thing out of my life. We have put the greatest minds of our generation and the next into keeping you addicted to these devices; it's no surprise to me that there are articles like this one defending them. Of course there are. For me? I'm checking out.


The problem is that we sometimes need smartphones for looking things up. Like looking up whether some shop is open, or when the next train will go. Sure, we could live without them, like we did 20 years ago, but it wasn't easy. :(


I guess I'm lucky -- I almost never use my phone to look things up like that.

I will be switching to a dumbphone when my current smartphone dies, because keeping the smartphone secure has become unmanageably difficult to do and with every release, gets more so.

But I will be carrying a pocket computer as well as the dumb phone. That's what I really wanted my smartphone to be -- a computer I always have with me -- anyway, and smartphones were never very good at being that.

So, by tethering the pocket computer to the dumbphone, I can look things up when I need anyway.


Careful, if tethering is too easy, the addictive behavior creeps in again ...




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