I thought it was funny how the author explained typing text messages and also T9, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_%28predictive_text
Then again I realised that many younger people might had never have heard of them. Time flies.
My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
91–100 of 140 posts
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#92I expect that at some point, owning a dumb phone becomes cool again, like vinyl.
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#93I tried moving to a proper dumb phone, a Nokia 105, a few years back. I found out that it’s a massive social disadvantage, very isolating and means you have to carry more crap around all the time and keep more context in your head. It’s ten times more difficult to adapt to changes without information at hand. Experiment ended after three months and I’m glad it did. I get the ideological thing here but realistically s…
> keep more context in your head. That's the point. I call it "knowing what you need to be in control of your life". > It's ten times more difficult to adapt to changes without information at hand. I understand - for me, the argument goes that if I find myself needing to frantically google something, then I'm already on the wrong path. I accept this means that some lifestyles are not possible. Personally, I prefer it…
The issue is your mind is a terrible place to keep context because it’s unreliable and untrustworthy. Things get in the wrong order, warp into different things and sometimes even completely disappear. Any level of complexity to handle and you need to offload some of the load somewhere else lest you screw up. I’m known to be incredibly reliable and organised and that’s only because of the knowledge of above.
It’s not about frantically googling stuff. Last weekend the trains here went to hell here in the UK and the information at hand by the staff on how to get home was completely wrong. I managed to source information from elsewhere and that made the difference between me getting home at 21:00 or 23:30. Similarly when plan A fails (oh crap the restaurant we were going to is gone) then you can adapt to a plan B quickly with a good outcome.
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#94Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#95I decided to uninstall all social media apps and even the browser from my phone. It's working great. Sometimes I really need the browser and I temporarily reinstall it. But it's awesome not to have this constant distraction in my pocket, and I can still use whatsapp and listen to podcasts in my commute without any doomscrolling. I also have the wikipedia app.
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#96As 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 consistently get 4-5 days on my "shovelphone". Well, maybe its not a shovelphone. It's a 2021 midrange phone from a respectable manufacturer.
I just happen to use it as a simple phone with most of the crap turned off. Which maybe explains the improved battery life.
Edit: right now at 10% after 4 days and 16 hours. 8 hours of screen time. Top app was Microsoft Teams (56% of my battery usage).
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#97Knew immediately it was the 2720. It's all around a fantastic phone. The wifi tethering helps also if you carry around a laptop and spotify/whatsapp/google maps built in is also great. Imagine a 3g, pre 4g phone. Basically that's what it is. they're just hard to find for a good reason. :)
Does 2720 have a Spotify built-in? Last time I checked it doesn't. If Spotify is available then it's 10x more appealing to me
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#98I too tried to ditch my smartphone, buying one of the re-released Nokias. The experiment was DOA, since there was no way of transferring my contacts from the iPhone to the Nokia. Furthermore, Sweden runs on BankID (an electronic id service) and it wasn’t available for the Nokia. What did work on the other hand, was buying an Apple Watch with cellular. Now my phone is often in my bag/car/house and I’m still reachable…
Correct me if I’m wrong but you can do BankID with a chip and pin device from the major banks? When I first got BankID it was not tied to my phone and it was a lot of hassle to figure out how to make that the case with Handelsbanken (my bank at the time). Much easier with Nordea, nordea having greater English support (though not amazing) and a much better web interface (bordering amazing when compared with Handelsban…
My local shop is an AutoMat[1] that requires you to BankID with a QR code before the doors will open. I’m realistically not going to take my laptop, a personal hotspot, and my BankID card machine there to get in.
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#99Earlier 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. I don't really need one, despite loving train travel and independent exploration on holidays. Paper maps work fine, preparation using a normal computer too.
It's just like electricity, or having/not having a landline phone 40 years ago.
Re: My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver
#100As others have mentioned, this is not really a dumb phone. Sure it puts some more _friction_ into using modern Internet connected services, but you can still basically do everything a modern phone can do (it has a full modern browser). Heck you even get the modern experience of ads everywhere despite the limited screen and memory (the ads are all modal pages)! In fact, much of the review centers around "smart" featur…
You can do some things but I wouldn't stretch it and say you can "basically do everything a modern phone can do" because in my country I can't use it to identify myself, I can't do banking on it, I can't ride the bus, buy tickets for trains, make payments and a lot of other very essential things that are now in our smartphones.
I can't do most of these things even on a smartphone in the US!...
- identify myself: The state I'm in has not rolled out any support for electronic IDs so short of "taking a photo of a DL (which the Nokia also would allow for) and hoping for the best", I can't do this with a smartphone either.
- ride the bus, buy tickets for trains: Ditto for transit. No phone-compatible NFC integration at all means I still need a good old fashioned transit card. Train tickets can be bought digitally via the browser, which probably doesn't count (and the Nokia could also do this).
Also:
- banking: While there are dedicated apps, I don't see how the Nokia would prevent you from doing this via the bank's website or over the phone. Banking apps are not particularly more secure than the website and usually don't offer anything beyond what is available there.
So really a lot of the features mentioned are not that commonly available even for smartphones!