Why I love my dumbphone
Until recently, I was the proud owner of an HTC Magic running the Android operating system. Well, I say proud. Actually I got more and more fed up with it, until by the end of my two-year contract I actually longed to be rid of it. So I ditched it and got a Nokia 6303i instead. Here’s why…
- Freedom from the plug. The HTC needed juice every single night if it was going to get through a day of normal use. My dumbphone, by contrast, can go for almost a week without a sniff of electricity. No more am I a slave to the demands of a touchscreen tyrant.
- Actual portability. OK, a smartphone will fit in your pocket. But only in the same way that a wallet or a pack of cards will fit in there – i.e., not very comfortably. Dumbphones really are designed to be carried everywhere without constantly reminding you how big and heavy they are.
- No pussyfooting. Much as I’d like to spend my days posing in urban coffee shops, the truth is I’m usually either in my office or in the park, handing out fruit squash in a sandy environment. And having to care for a tender little touchscreen in a soft white faux-leather pouch doesn’t really fit with that. I need a phone that can take care of itself.
- Social media cold turkey. No longer do I itch to check my replies on Twitter, or share a photo of my lunch – because I can’t. And I don’t miss it at all. Instead of going online in every spare second, I try to appreciate the places I am and the things I’m doing. (See How social media ruined our lives for more on this theme.)
- Quick and easy. By the time my HTC was updated with the latest version of Android, it had become incredibly slow. Starting up took about three minutes, and shutting down wasn’t much quicker. The camera, pointlessly tarted up with redundant animations and backgrounds, was almost unusable. Maybe it was intended to encourage me to upgrade – instead I went for a dumbphone, and now enjoy a snappy, responsive device that ‘just works’.
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I bought a £2 Alcatel phone from CPW to replace my HTC Desire when I went to Benicasim this summer. I couldn’t get over how blown away all my friends were by the fact I hadn’t charged it for over 5 days.
It was like the way we were all blown away by 3G, cameras, and apps. I long for the day they combine the two, but it seems our insatiable appetite for new technology always exceeds battery capacities.
My phone had a special feature: a light! It was great.
I hold my Motorolla Razr V1(yes, V1) up to the back of my iPod Touch to create an ‘iPhone’ with great mobile reception. Long live dumb phones!
You highlighted many of the same reasons why I still hold onto my old phone. Though it has internet connectivity, I only really use it to push email to my phone when I am out of the office during the day. I’d much rather plug my phone in every three or four days than twice a day. Best of all, it is extremely compact and can actually fit in the palm of your hand.
Tom I had you pegged as a Motorola Timeport kind of guy.
No doubt! My iPhone 3GS just died, after three years of faithful use, with no chance of revival, cheaply anyway, and I am not about to go back on a contract plan ever again. I bought a cheap throw away phone (TracFone) just to get me through until I make a decision on which way to go, and not only was it kind of neat going back to a phone just being a phone again…small, battery life that lasts a week or more, light as can be, but I was also very surprised to find my per minute charge for talk time could be, potentially, less than half the cost per minute as I was paying on my AT&T plan. Heck, probably even more than that, since I never came anywhere close to using my allotted 400 minutes a month and had thousands of unused rollovers when I cancelled my service!
I am more of a data person than a phone person, so I am actually considering going with a dumb phone + iPod Touch combo, using my MiFi (with 1GB $20 monthly plan) for any data service on the go. I know from my ATT account that I rarely ever went over 1GB of data a month on my iPhone. So for what I was paying about $90 a month for with ATT, I will basically have with this set up, at a cost of around $27 a month. You do that math…over the course of a year, that is a HUGE savings! So, I have to carry around three small little devices, all of which fit in my teeny tiny purse that I carry (I have the smallest purse out of any woman I know), with no problem at all. Those three devices, weight in at about the weight of the iPhone I was carrying. I’ll take the savings, longer battery life on a phone, so it’s there when I need it, and a shiny new iPod touch, thank you! 😉