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My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

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Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#131

Post by ikr678 »

jabbany wrote: post #41
gnicholas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with getting around (public transit timing, driving directions/traffic, uber/lyft) without a smartphone?

Figuring out directions (driving, walking, transit) is actually quite easy in most cities. My approach is to just lump specific places into general "areas", get familiar with how to get between areas (transit/driving options) by thinking about their absolute positions and connections that exist, and then for unfamiliar places, look it up on a map before leaving. The only thing I miss with navigation is real-time traf…

Our brains evolved to wayfind from landmarks (there's a part of the brain largely dedicated to it, found from studies on cab drivers). but using GPS navigation changes how you remember a journey you havent made before, and makes you much less likely to retain it. The screen will show you as the centred object, and your map and reference points shift on the screen relative to you.

With say analog map navigation, your position moves (you trace with your finger/update it mentally) relative to fixed landmarks on the map, so you get a better sense of their spatial relation to one another.

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#132

Post by Beltalowda »

sneak wrote: post #129
Beltalowda wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is just as smartphone-tied as WhatsApp. It's actually worse, as there is no web version and the desktop app is flaky. So there is no improvement here at all in this regard.

This is hugely incorrect. Signal is private, WhatsApp is not. Go read the app privacy labels if you don't believe me.

This is about smartphone usage, not privacy. You're injecting a completely different issue here.

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#133

Post by ProllyInfamous »

I had several life-changing events occur early 2021, which led to me not using any telephone services, whatsoever (until late 2021). Instead, I purchased a one-way pager (Pagers Direct) on a two-year contract, for When I tell people to "page me," I get one of two responses:

A) "What does that mean?!" (typically younger folks, less than thirty), or

B) [Initial Disbelief] "They still make those?!" (typically older folks, above forty)

I absolutely love it; of course this affects my social life... except that I run with an extremely small crowd, in a particularly small subset of my mid-sized US town.

I now have access to my cell phone, but it never leaves my house (used essentially as a landline, because it costs less than a local landline); I will BLOCK my Caller ID when making phone calls to anybody (outside a few trusted contacts), and I never hand out my new cell phone number (and disabled my decades-used phone#).

To each his own — I am mid-30s, and used to be 1337 ... never really understood cell phone culture, and am happily marching to my own beat!

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#134

Post by kalleboo »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #58
zibzab wrote: post #31

As the author points out, buying a simple a android phone and disabling most of the "smartness" is a much better option. This is what I did and it works surprising well. I still have a decent camera and can use my banking app etc. You could say that I actually have a pretty decent phone I just disciplined myself to use it as little as possible. Edit: the part I am really missing is the compactness of a dumb phone. Ye…

How a shovelphone is better? The author mentions 5 days is great battery life. My old dumbphone with halfdead battery has 5 days life, and it's short, used to be 15 days or so.

I don't know how things are these days but when I was doing the digital nomad thing I had an old android with my home SIM in it in order to accept calls if anything important came in, and just by disabling data and wifi it would last a week on standby. Smartphones have huge batteries that they waste on keeping always-on TCP connections going. Remove those and it should last forever

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#135

Post by zephyr9 »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #80
zephyr9 wrote: post #3

I switched from an iPhone to Nokia 515 two years ago and vowed never to go back. If I wrote a blog post like this it would probably just be, "Living smartphone-free in the 2020's is like having a superpower, it's utter joy and freedom and and everyone still with a smartphone is a total sucker." Then a couple of weeks ago I felt the social pressure and lack of a good camera so I bought an iPhone 12 mini. It was awful.…

Wouldn't you get a better and cheaper camera if it's really a camera and not a phone?

Short answer, yes, long answer, it depends.

A lot of camera capabilities hinge on the physical size of the sensor, i.e. how much power it consumes to shoot and how much heat it generates. An iPhone camera sensor is tiny and so can do pretty amazing things like shoot 1080p 240fps slow-motion. Trying to do that with a 4/3" sensor is more demanding. I need slow-motion for my work.

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#136

Post by zephyr9 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #81
Beltalowda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just write things down on a piece of paper; or just "yolo it". It works well enough, although lack of GPS can be inconvenient at times, I find it's not a huge deal – this is how almost everyone got around up to ~10 years ago. I never used taxi services anyway; bus services are pretty good here, and I cycle. A bigger issue is that a lot of services are "smartphone-only", and can't be done with a regular computer; so…

My wife and I will have to buy one soon, because it is pretty much the only way we can establish a line of communication with other parents of my young son's peers at kindergarten (he's nearing 3). Not doing so would stunt his growth on an emotional level, because we would deprive him of things like play dates and such. Not due to malice on the part of other parents, but because not having WhatsApp (here in the Nethe…

> It's so incredibly silly how owning a smartphone isn't even a matter of preference any more; people just expect everyone to have one.

Most of society has transitioned now to just being custodians of smartphones -- moving the smartphones around, feeding the smartphones their various diet of information and imagery, tending to their demands for attention and updates etc. Surely it will be an unfamiliar experience to have just a regular person walk among them.

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#137

Post by yusmary »

Beltalowda wrote: post #128
sneak wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will never be free of WhatsApp if we continue caving and using the service, making it more valuable to others. Every time you cave and use Facebook spyware, you make it harder for the next person. Stop using tools that make the world worse. Tell your contacts to install Signal instead. You must be unreachable on WhatsApp, so that the utility of the app is not increased for others.

Signal is just as smartphone-tied as WhatsApp. It's actually worse, as there is no web version and the desktop app is flaky. So there is no improvement here at all in this regard.

Signal is also shitty in the sense that it announces your presence to anyone that is using the service prior to you and has your number.

If you only want some people to know you are there, you are screwed

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#138

Post by kalleboo »

nulbyte wrote: post #2

> ...there are apps in KaiOS Store... A phone that can run apps doesn't count as a dumbphone on my book. Do I use the term differently than most people? When I think of dumb phone, I think of the StarTAC, probably because it was my first. The RAZR was dumb, too, in my mind. A modern example for me is the Punkt MP02. It runs Android, technically, but you wouldn't know it, because you can dobmuch with it but, you know,…

The RAZR could run J2ME apps though. At the time there were J2ME Facebook, Twitter, Opera Mini web browser, Google Maps (with street view), tons of games, etc.

When the original iPhone came out and didn’t support apps I (unsuccessfully) argued that that meant it wasn’t a smartphone, and it was even less smart than most dumb phones on the market.

At the time I used Sony Ericsson dumbphones, and they had very rich J2ME support - you could set Java apps as a live wallpaper (which iPhone still doesn't allow), multitask (which took years to get to the iPhone) and all this on very very modest (single-digit MB RAM) dumbphone hardware.

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#139

Post by eru »

rootsudo wrote: post #52
pedroaraujo wrote: post #40

I don't understand these kind of posts. Can't people just use a regular smartphone phone and _not_ install Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.?

It's hard to resist. It's like being on a diet/fasting but having your cabinets stocked with all unhealthy food or a drug abuser with free drugs they can't have. Self control and discipline start somewhere.

Self-control and discipline also take a lot of mental energy out of some people.

If you set yourself up not to need to exert this discipline, like in your example of keeping junk food out of the house, that's a burden off your mind.

That's mental energy you can use for other things.

(This simple analogy of requiring exhaustible mental resources for discipline doesn't necessarily apply to everyone. But there are some people it does apply to.)

Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

#140

Post by geden »

MrJagil wrote: post #63
geden wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Series 7 lasts all day and a night. Charges super fast. I've also found myself using it as a 'dumb but useful phone'. Having Apple Pay / train tickets on it has been surprisingly useful. The activity tracking has been surprisingly motivating. Hard recommend.

How does train tickets work? I’m in europe, and havn’t really looked into it… do you “share” the tickets to the wallet app? You have a “train” app on your watch? Just show a qr code in an email? Been wanting to set this up for a while…

I just add the tickets to Apple Wallet and they appear on the watch. I buy either directly via LNER website or The Trainline app.
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