Technology

Why would I want a device that I never use? I only make phone calls roughly 3 times per week. I message multiple times a day, but flip phones had shitty interfaces for typing. The vast majority of my phone use is web search, camera, navigation, and messaging. Flip phones could get better cameras than they used to have. Their screens were too small to do great at web searching. Navigation might work, I guess. Although I used to love my Treo and Pre for the full physical keyboard, I prefer swype typing now to tapping or physical keys.

I'm switching to a Garmin smartwatch and a point n shoot camera in the near future. I'm excited to see how it changes adventuring.

You may as well ask me to throw away me phone entirely. I don't carry a smartphone to make phone calls. I hate phone calls.

95% of that is spam.

I use my phone to take pictures, send those pictures, look for restaurants, navigate to those restaurants, listen to music, etc.

It’s solving device addiction with another device. Sure it will be very interesting to investigate phone models to pick from. Indeed we are good at tricking ourselves. Creating “windows” with no phone at all works better for me.

I'm closer to carrying around a cyberdeck than a dumbphone.

I don't like either sms or phonecalls.

Pretty much because my smartphone is basically my digital Swiss army knife. Like even if I got a separate digital camera and MP3 Player, I also use it for navigation and to communicate with my parents and friends over signal, and like hell I am gonna give up signal. Add to that it's also my portable wifi hotspot when I'm out, my train tickets, and how I pay for things when I'm sans-purse, I don't know if I can give up my smartphone.

Would it be good for me to get off social media and to stop doomscrolling the news? Yes, but I can do that by going out and touching grass.

It would have to have Signal.

I'd like to be able to use Signal.

I don't make phone calls and rarely use SMS. All the features I need/want from a phone would be missing.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I genuinely love my phone. It makes my life better.

Being forced to use a stock google android or iOS would be what drives me to use a dumb phone.

As long as I can install a custom ROM like LineageOS or GrapheneOS, I'm good.

No

The main blocker is MFA. I can technically work around Google Authenticator (I use Aegis currently) because I can run it on my laptop, but I also need Okta verify (work VPN), Symantec VIP (bank), and the Steam app.

And some other very nice to haves:

• Signal messenger
• SSH client
• Libby app
• Organic Maps

I can find workaround for the rest.

That said, wouldn't it just be easier to uninstall the apps that cause distractions?

Whatsapp. That's the only fucking reason I'm not using a dumbphone. In Brazil, everyone uses it. Need to talk to a company? Whatsapp. Friends and family? Wpp. Book a medical checkup? Wpp.

There's also the problem of cell phone fees being abusive when calling/messaging people from a different company.

Honestly, for me, it's the one-two-three punch of easy notes taken anywhere + podcasts + camera.

• notes : before smartphones I carried a notebook in my pocket. And sometimes I still do; writing longhand is still pleasant for me, and being able to sketch and doodle with my notes is still clunky with a touchscreen, amazingly. But the experience of losing my notebook, or not having the right one with me when I need it, is disproportionately frustrating to me.

• podcasts : this is one of the few ways my ADHD brain truly focuses. Listening to a podcast while walking, biking, running, driving, doing dishes, cleaning a room, mowing the lawn, etc. is almost foolproof in getting me to pay attention to the content. I have to be in the right mood to read, and videos are background noise to me after having the Discovery Channel or Scifi Channel on 24/7 in my apartment in college. Before smartphones I had a trusty RCA Lyra that went everywhere with me; and while the form factor and experience were fantastic, I now have a backlog of over 800 podcast episodes that would not fit on that device's 512MB internal storage. (Also, I just got a pair of noise canceling earbuds, and I have to admit I really like them)

• camera : I've chosen my last four smartphones based on the camera quality. I've got kids, and being able to take adorable pictures of them at the drop of a hat is very useful to me. I don't need all the computational nonsense, but I do need it to be good enough and ever-present. Before smartphones, I would occasionally bring a digital camera around with me, but I can't afford one that would give me the quality I want, and it wouldn't fit in my pocket anyway.

Messaging, fitness tracking, and work stuff is also easier, though not in a way that I don't think I could backfill with other things if needed.

Nostalgia aside, the experience of these big three use cases is indisputably better with a smartphone than it was in 2005. Could I live without them? Yes! Absolutely. But I'd prefer not to, and since I shook my social media addiction I don't really feel the need to.

WhatsApp is non optional

Exclusively Internet calls and texts. Most of my communication is split between regular and texting and discord or Whatsapp.

Doesn't have to be those apps but something I can make a call with internationally

Well I had the displeasure of having to use a candybar style phone my mother was using cause it was 'easier' for her.

• Ages to write a message
• Very difficult to navigate through very similar SMSs (automated ones like electronic prescriptions) and pick the correct one based on date. Or even get an accurate broader picture of how many SMSs you received and when.
• Did not setup email but I believe it would also be horrendous

But in my case, I disagree with the base premise of this post. The biggest anxiety and distraction caused by my phone is via phone calls. Asynchronous communications like sms and email are much better for me.

Dumb phone features are about 5% of what I use on a daily basis on my phone.

I haven’t thought about switching mainly because I listen to music, books from the library and podcasts on it. I don’t want to go back to carrying 2 devices. But I mostly use my phone to look stuff up, check email, and music/books etc. I don’t really use social media on it.

geocaching

I might switch to a flip phone if it had gps and maps.

That's simply the killer app for smart phones, at this point it's a necessary part of my life. Without it I need a separate device just for that, and that device is actually less useful.

Edit: now that I'm reading other responses I have to agree, secure messaging and 2fa are really important too.

I could live without everything else, but to be honest, I don't use much else. A few games, Lemmy, music apps, audiobook apps. Of those, Lemmy is the app most likely to leave me feeling upset, or like I want to doomscroll.

I think limiting the apps I use is the biggest thing I can do to not make the phone a negative influence for me. But to be clear, if that starts happening, Lemmy is the first to go, I already don't use any other social media.

I used a flip/dumbphone for most of my teenage and high school years.

It's like asking what would make me go back to having a DOS computer and playing Wolf3D after being in full body virtual reality with Half Life Alyx.

The best setup in my eyes would be :

Dumb phone to take with you for calls / text messages and a non Sim card smartphone that would have apps on it but be hotspot over using the dumb phones data. Basically wifi only

That way if I were just doing errands on the weekend, just take the dumb phone. And then take the smartphone for onsite job trips and whatnot.

Smartphone would be degoogled. Remember, 2fa authentication doesn't need mobile data to work, its time based

I know exactly what I need my phone for: music, maps, banking, messaging, books and sometimes traveling. Anything else I have is a distraction that I'm addicted to have.

You know what keeps me from binning it? The FOMO, and not being able to hold conversations with friends and coworkers because I'm would not be tuned to the latest trends and happenings, and that sucks.

I have exactly one game and exactly one 2fa app that I would meaningfully miss out on switching to a dumb pbone, outside of those two things I would genuinely consider it.

Dumbphones are ridiculously insecure, and they only support SMS communications which don't have any end-to-end encryption.

I would not give up the smartphone for a dumb phone, primarily for the superior security and privacy smartphones provide that dumb phones just do not have technology for.

This conversation has a tone of settling for inferior technology to do the work a well-designed smartphone experience should.

The smartphone can be made pretty "dumb" - the user experience has more to do with the software (apps) added to it than the hardware (the smartphone) itself.

Aside from the apps the platform bundles, I only have Signal (for text and voice), email, a browser, calendar, a note taking app and a FOSS music player. I have disabled all sound and visual notifications and removed all apps off the main screen.

Of late, I've moved the SIM-card onto a secondary phone that resides in my bag, which is only switched-on for navigation or if I need WiFi in a snap.

It has not always been this way for me and I am sure my setup will continue to evolve as my needs change.

nothing would stop me and honestly if I could find a decent and new one similar to my old Sprint/Nokia phone from like 2001 I'd use it. I can't stand smart phones, I never liked them.

Eh, I see no reason to switch to a dumb phone, because I don't think I'm that bad with my current phone. My main User profile on GrapheneOS is pretty minimal when it comes to apps, it's mostly messaging, banking, navigation, workout and music (I should probably move Lemmy and Pixelfed to a different profile, but they both have pretty little potential for scrolling for too long since the new content is naturally limited).
The only game on this profile is the one I'm developing as a hobby project lol

All the annoying Apps (Secondary Email, Amazon, Aliexpress, Linkedin, Smartlife, Grocery store coupon apps etc) are banished to a secondary profile that has no permission to run in the background or send any notifications.

I'm not a toddler so don't need help with "distractions" so nothing. That's like reverting computers to windows 95 just because modern operating systems can run Steam.

I think it definitely depends on the persons needs. I use my phone for maps when I am going somewhere I am unfamiliar with. I use it for pod casts and audio books all the time. I use it for checking my bank account. Could I use something else to do these? Sure, but do I have access to all of the secondary devices to accomplish all of the above, not always. So yeah, the smart phone did become the catch all for a ton of daily processes, and I don’t have to carry 10 devices anymore.

My smartphone isn't a phone with "extra" features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don't want to carry an extra "dumb" phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver's license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the "year of the Linux desktop". But a kid can dream.

well, I work in IT. So I am required to use apps like Teams for mobile and DUO 2FA in order to authenticate my laptop sessions.

Now, could I use only SMS/email 2FA? Technically yes. And I could just have Teams on my work laptop and have that nearby all the time, but it would be extremely inconvenient. Navigation would also be a big problem. Due to the nature of my job, I frequently have to visit a large number of different sites around my area. Having to open my laptop each time I need to go somewhere, open up a map site like OSM or Google maps to get the directions, print them off or write them down, then follow them manually hoping that I don't encounter random slowdowns or closures in an area I am not familiar with is basically a non-starter for me.

As for personal use, navigation rears its ugly head again. I often will be traveling with friends or family and we decide on a whim to change our destination for dinner or hangouts after based on times, appetites, budgets, closures, etc. Having a map app on my phone makes that easy to do. It would be impossible to do that without it, unless I had a near exhaustive knowledge of my whole city and surrounding suburbs.

Honestly navigation is the #1 thing. Random other stuff comes up, like my mobile password manager Bitwarden, or my various apps like my City's bus/metro app, and my city's parking app. Both of which again, I could make do without, but it would be extremely tough and inconvenient.

I've decided that the happy medium for me is to use as much FOSS phone tech as possible. That way at least the tracking and data harvesting is minimized and I am generally not supporting megacorps.

I use GrapheneOS, with mostly FOSS apps. The proprietary apps I do use are isolated with GOS's special sauce. I use Magic Earth for my navigation, which while not open source, the data sets they use are, and they are not google, and based in the EU, so far better privacy than Google's trash.

I wish I could switch to a flip phone, I've seriously considered it many times over the last several years. But for my lifestyle, it's just not feasible. The best balance for me is to compute ethically on my mobile. I have thought about going for the weekend with just a dumb phone, that might be possible, but I'll have to see.