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Dumber phone

nomasters.io

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Re: Dumber phone

#151

Post by adhambadr »

cimmanom wrote: post #141
adhambadr wrote: post #122

Checkout our phone www.blloc.com . I think its exactly what we thought of, dumbing down the smartphone to the bare essentials without missing out too much. we don't have it perfectly communicated (working on it), but we're trying to find the middle between a "smartphone" and full blown detox. We got inspired from some of our friends who went "dark" and didn't work out; we were as product designers sick of snapchat, g…

This is an amazing idea! Are the actual apps it runs just Android apps with their default interfaces, or is each one something you've custom-built internally, or what?

yes just Android apps. We used a lot of the widget-interface functionalities most famous apps already did to build this simplified UI, it was a lot straight forward than we thought.

Re: Dumber phone

#152

Post by masklinn »

bad_user wrote: post #32
masklinn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a 3310 and a mobile hotspot with a data-only sim? The Huawei E5770 has 500h standby 20h activity, an ethernet port and USB power output (to act as a powerbank).

The problem with portable routers is that it requires a different plan and you always have the phone with you, so you're not in danger of forgetting it home.

> The problem with portable routers is that it requires a different plan

So? You can get a voice-only plan for the dumbphone and a data-only plan for the AP.

> and you always have the phone with you

Given the AP is useless on its own, you can just leave it in your laptop/tablet bag (whichever you're using).

Re: Dumber phone

#153

Post by radix07 »

gkya wrote: post #86
procparam wrote: post #19

One huge distraction-enabler is the fingerprint sensor. It makes things too easy for me - I put my hand in my pocket, put my finger on the sensor, and by the time it's in front of my face I can be mindlessly browsing reddit. So I would add the following tip: disable the fingerprint sensor if you have one (also face recognition, etc), and replace it with an inconveniently long password. This way you really need to thi…

Reddit, the serial time-killer. Removing it from my phone was a tangible life improvement. And on desktop, I've moved everything to multis so that my reddit homepage is empty like a desert, so that I have to choose what to see purposefully from the sidebar. Thus I don't compulsively go to reddit and get lured by a sea of interesting links. This has helped cut the time I spend on reddit by, well IDK, I don't spend mor…

I have been using protopage.com, which is basically what iGoogle was back in the day. I just drop in the RSS feeds for the top posts from subs I want to check out and have it limit the number of posts. I do that with HN and a few other sites as well. Although would be nice to be able to set a minimum refresh rate so newer stuff wouldn't pop up on refresh.

Re: Dumber phone

#155

Post by akincisor »

adhambadr wrote: post #122

Checkout our phone www.blloc.com . I think its exactly what we thought of, dumbing down the smartphone to the bare essentials without missing out too much. we don't have it perfectly communicated (working on it), but we're trying to find the middle between a "smartphone" and full blown detox. We got inspired from some of our friends who went "dark" and didn't work out; we were as product designers sick of snapchat, g…

FYI: Without third party JS, your site loads completely blank.

Edit: Even allowing jquery, it still shows blank complaining about stripe. Your page should not be so completely reliant on stripe.

Re: Dumber phone

#156

Post by adhambadr »

akincisor wrote: post #155
adhambadr wrote: post #122

Checkout our phone www.blloc.com . I think its exactly what we thought of, dumbing down the smartphone to the bare essentials without missing out too much. we don't have it perfectly communicated (working on it), but we're trying to find the middle between a "smartphone" and full blown detox. We got inspired from some of our friends who went "dark" and didn't work out; we were as product designers sick of snapchat, g…

FYI: Without third party JS, your site loads completely blank. Edit: Even allowing jquery, it still shows blank complaining about stripe. Your page should not be so completely reliant on stripe.

oh thanks for the heads up. Sticking to minimalism we wanted the checkout to be a one-stop checkout on the landing page experience. we should build a plan B

Re: Dumber phone

#157

Post by floren »

nabla9 wrote: post #30
parvenu74 wrote: post #9

Personally, I would love a flip phone with a removable battery and a physical button on the side to turn WiFi hotspot functionality on/off -- with OFF being the default. Having a phone that you only need to charge once a week is a great feature!

You are describing new Nokia 8110 4G (aka "the matrix phone" reincarnated) * 25 days on standby, 8.5 hours LTE voice calls * removable battery * WiFi hotspot functionality * 4G network connectivity * KaiOS will have basic apps (Google maps, FB, Google assistant and reportetly WhatsApp in near future) https://www.nokia.com/en_in/phones/nokia-8110-4g

I'm sold, when is it coming out?

Re: Dumber phone

#158

Post by hawski »

thanatropism wrote: post #111
hawski wrote: post #44

For me it's the browser. What I did yesterday on Firefox for Android: - installed uBlock Origin (also First Party Isolation and HTTPS Everywhere), - disabled JavaScript via about:config javascript.enabled, - and added .css| rule to uBlock Origin (I would still like to disable CSS entirely, this only half works). Basically I would like to have "links2 -g" [0] for Android. There is also an extension for Firefox to auto…

Have you already seen this? https://surf.suckless.org/ It's webkit, not firefox-based, but works great with tiling windowmanagers.

I've seen it. Sadly it's just a nice thin interface over WebKit. I guess I could customize it to do somewhat what I want, but it would still run on WebKit. On Linux I can use alternative browsers like links -g, WebSurf or Dillo, but on mobile there are no such luxuries.

I would just like to have the target experience (and lightness) out of the box, but on all platforms.

Re: Dumber phone

#159

Post by cmiles74 »

jhoechtl wrote: post #85
yosito wrote: post #27

Personally, I find my smartphone addiction gets worse when I turn off all notifications. Because then FOMO takes over and I spend tons of time digging into apps to make sure I didn't "miss anything". For me, it works much better to intentionally choose the notifications I get to be the things I really want to be interrupted by. I wish there were an AI or human secretary who could make those judgements on a per-notifi…

Not for me. However I seem to differ from may orhers who agree with you that I am not curious enough to miss the kitten posted next door nor the fancy meal plate of random strangers, intermingled by advertisment or is it already the other way round? Without these notifications I stay more focused and get less stressed.

Once I started turning application notifications off, I began to see much more clearly how manipulative they are. For instance, Facebook started emailing me, something I didn't realize I had to disable (up until then, I don't remember them mailing me anything). Twitter would pointlessly send a notification for "Person X and 42 others liked this tweet" and so on, clearly because I was opening their application less.

Re: Dumber phone

#160

Post by whitepoplar »

If you have an iPhone, it seems like the best way to create a "dumb phone" is to set it up as a supervised[0] device, which allows you to pick and choose which apps are allowed on the phone, or to disable the app store altogether. It's intended for enterprise use, but seems like it would also be useful for self control.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202837

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