I think for most people, just putting an extra step between you and whatever toxic app(s) you have can be enough. It mostly works for me, and as an added bonus you get insane battery life. I would try that before buying a new phone.

iPhone dumbphone

695 points 9 months ago 396 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171200

Android basically what I do: https://jordanherzstein.neocities.org/posts/adb_vanadium/

Just add a long password for the owner profile, live in the user profile and you're golden.

My list of requirements isn't long: 1) should make/receive phone calls, 2) should make/receive text messages, 3) have physical buttons and 4) preferably use 4G and be able to create hotspots (the last requirement, I have deviated on occasionally, like with my current phone). A requirement 0, if you will, is that it needs to do these things at high quality. But in one way or another, they suffer wildly in either hardware or software, or both. Often to the point, where I wonder if the creators themselves use them.

The two Nokias unfortunately have quite a few ad programs (like Facebook of all things), that just clutter up its menu (but which I can thankfully just ignore), its T9 dictionary is weak (though this will be a recurring theme, they are all bad at doing T9 dictionary typing), and its text message storage is severely limited. The Punkt. MP02 had high quality hardware, but again its T9 typing was frustrating, and eventually mine just bricked. The Mudita Pure was probably the worst one, though: it only supported characters A-Z, despite being developed in Poland, which is frustrating when living in a country, that regularly uses characters beyond that. The Doro 7030 had bad buttons, that often wouldn't properly click, leading to missed characters while typing, and it had an annoying behaviour, where sometimes it would just miss calls, and its T9 typing was abysmal.

I still have all the phones (except the Mudita Pure, which I sold to someone in Greece, even though I explicitly warned them it would not work at all with Greek letters, which they later confirmed, as it was just showing squares), and I am generally sad, that it feels like a bit of an electronic waste.

And why not a dumbed down smartphone, then? My requirement 3 isn't debatable, I loath touch screens; they are - for me at least - the bane of modern existence. I cannot avoid them entirely, but I can lower my own exposure. For example, when I bought an induction stove top, I made sure to get one with knobs.

Maybe when I feel ready again, I will try my hand at another[0]...

[0] https://dumbwireless.com/collections/phones

I'm looking for a dumb phone and this looked promising until no email. Email is underrated as a time saver, if you aren't getting hundreds of emails daily which is a choice. Email is not as urgent as text or phone calls and its main advantage is that it separates the sender/receiver schedule or timezone.

People need to learn to guard their time and schedule like a hawk and not operate in chronic reaction mode, i.e. someone else setting your priorities for the day.

Fortunately I have discipline enough that my smartphone is a glorified dumb phone with a great camera and some other useful apps. Everything else I try to offload to iPad since I am much less often on that device. It also takes a bit of time and effort but focus modes are great too.

I noticed this made a huge difference, I'm much more focused on training and my gym sessions finish a lot faster.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18212311/palm-phone-review...

That limits the ability to use it (or buy it) in any «unsupported» country.

I've seen people use Screen Time on iOS to help them 'adjust' their behavior. There was a thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48312443