Welcome to the new "I don't own a Television"
Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
151–160 of 274 posts
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Life with a smart phone is so much better than life before a smart phone. But at what cost? The software and OS is a locked-down ecosystem for most consumers. The hardware even more so. Such mass adoption forces one to conform in order to participate, meaning even for the privacy-conscious, consumer trends dictate all. Just a couple months ago US carriers were found to be selling realtime customer location data. Wh…
If the average person doesn't care enough to: * vote into power people that actually care about privacy * or to only buy products that protect their privacy what makes you think all this matters? The average person has decided that life is better for him like this...
>The average person has decided that life is better for him like this...
Indeed, I do. You want to track the stores I drive by and what websites I visit? In exchange I can have real-time commnuication with friends all over the world without having to align scheduled to make phone calls of varying connection quality, I can get step by step directions on how to do just about anything including get from point A to B, I can take photos and share them, I can read, I can consume video and audio, I can track my macros, I can get immediate weather alerts, track ODB-II data for my car, get curated news, get raw news, augment my memory with drive/dropbox/evernote, I can track my finances? DEAL!
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#153I'm doing this since 2016 and never looked back. Also I got rid of FB and Google and am far more focused now. It was easy for me because growing up in the 70/80ies I never became as addicted to it. Looking at my kids I have many regrets for being positive about technology while they grew up. As an engineer I felt it was normal to expose them to screens from an early age. If I could go back in time this is what I'd change and regret the most: exposing my kids to this shit.
If I look at younger people I hang out with it's sad to see some of them would have a panic attack if asked to leave home without their phone. It sounds totally crazy to them. They grew up with parents constantly reminding them to bring their phone, and they would have gotten into trouble any time they would forget the phone, run out of battery or be otherwise unreachable. It's panic passed down from (my) generation ...
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#154I obliterated one of my smartphones last year after dropping it on concrete while getting off the bus. I freaked out, had no clue what to do since I was low income and couldn't afford anything for quite awhile. For a few days it was like I was an addict, constantly feeling my back pocket vibrating, constantly reaching to check my phone. After a few more days, I felt very liberated. I felt very free. I started enjoyin…
My first question to anyone who says they can live without a smartphone: what do you use for two factor auth?
I just by accident and not trying, held onto my hard token and no one has noticed for my main user acct. But my other tokens for different domain accounts administrator accts are on my smart phone. I have it for only that reason. I much prefer candy bar nokia's.
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't know a 6310 could read and send email, thank you. I stopped having Nokia phones after the 3310i (which I did love dearly). There are numerous first world countries that have unreliable public transport. This is the US and also in the EU, I can't imagine you've never encountered what I mean unless you don't travel very much (there is nothing wrong with that, but then why do you discuss it like this). Sure in…
I live in EU, but in not-so-reliable public transit country. Outside of major towns, smart phone won't help you much to get most accurate time table. Paper timetable in the station is the only source of true information. You may find multiple contradicting timetables on the web and just hope they haven't been changed since then. Nobody cares to post emergency updates on the web. Sticker in the station it is. GPS live…
Which country is that? Just out of curiosity (fellow European).
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost everybody has impulses they can't control; the rational response is to plan ahead of time to limit the damage they do.
As a child, sure. That's part and parcel of growing up. But I would expect healthy adults to be able to control their impulses when it comes to things like wasting time on their phone. If someone genuinely can't, they're in trouble, and tossing the phone aside is treating the symptom at best.
Impulse control is really hard. But more importantly, it’s a losing battle, even for adults, if you use many popular services today. The reason is simple. Most of these services have highly paid and intelligent folks, whose sole purpose is to use the unprecedented private data they have on you, to hack into deep biological impulses embedded in every human built over millennia, to have you use their service more.
Its frankly not possible and anyone who believes otherwise is likely fooling themselves.
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but if you're using it only to fill a gap of time because it's there, it's worth evaluating whether you really need all the enrichment smartphones offer.
If you live in this time in history, you will be increasingly inconvenienced without a smart phone. If you need to give it up to put it down, then your problem isn't smartphones, and you will fill it with something else in short order. Moreover, you are going to be increasingly at odds with your surroundings: the world is becoming more smartphone-like, not less.
A lot of this is contrary to my experience having lived without a cell phone.
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're not valuing your priorities with a phone, you won't value them without it. Exactly right. I hear more and more people complaining about the internet, their smartphones or tech in general. If you listen to those people long enough you realize what they are actually talking about is social media and to a lesser degree gaming. I just don't get it. If you don't like those services, don't use them. Have some s…
- Hi, I'm anonymous alcoholic, I decided not to carry a bottle of alcohol with me at all times. - Have some self restraint for crying out loud.
100% agree, even for those who are not addicts, we're not always perfectly aware of/or in control of our actions, and social media platforms are designed to take advantage of this. When I deleted facebook on my phone I'd often find myself in a quiet moment idly scrolling through my apps looking to open it again.
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Reading email on your phone also needs a smartphone. Nokia 6310 could both read and send emails, and I'm sure the functionality arrived slightly earlier too. >>second point I mean, if I'm in some 3rd world country without a reliable public transport system, then I'm not sure how internet access or a smartphone for that matter helps at all. In my experience in those places the bus/train just turns up when it does, n…
A flip-phone can be a smart phone. Blackberries were smartphones. They had enumerable apps shoved into that tiny display, and keyboard model, but they still looked like flip-phones and lacked touch displays. To me, the 'flip' is just a mechanical implementation detail. The real divide is smart phones versus dumb phones.
Or even between phones with app stores / web browsers / sideloading, and those without.
A phone that comes with its own apps (like old flip-phones) but doesn’t offer any other extensibility, usually only has apps written by the manufacturer to support standard protocols like email and SMS, and no support for any company’s walled-garden social superstimulus factory. Even WAP was okay, since WAP only worked to deliver information, not interactive “experiences.”
(Admittedly, one of those apps could have been an IRC client, which would have been quite immersing. Luckily we never saw such from the manufacturers—they left that sort of thing to the J2ME sideloading ecosystem.)
Re: Why I’m Using a Flip Phone
#160I find it easier to just not install apps. My wife and I have a rule - minimal phone use around one another. We hold each other to it, unless both of us agree to look something up. Perhaps it's because we both think it's rude, I don't know.. Now, although that works generally - my wife will often spend hours pouring over Instagram a week. She too, has mixed feelings about it and on the one hand wants to delete it, an…
I'm in a similar position, since I only download libre apps unless it's for work or something, I realised after I got rid of my proprietary apps (Instagram being the main one) I didn't get as distracted and became miles more productive. While I have stuff like Telegram and Mastodon I either end up paying attention to a few notifications and moving on or just seeing so much content that I'm too lazy to go through and I feel like that's because neither feature algorithmic timelines, discover pages etc.