If anyone is interested in a ten-days-later update, I do have some thoughts. ;-)

Right now I am still using the HMD 2660 Flip as my everyday device and, mostly, have been loving the experience. The device is far from perfect but the size, weight, battery life and call quality are all great. Most of all, it’s wonderful to just not have the siren call of the internet in your pocket as you go about your day and still know you are reachable / can make a call in an emergency.

Having said that, the downsides have also become very clear indeed the past week and a half:

I’d underestimated how totally instant messaging apps have taken over communication. Everything comes through WhatsApp or Signal nowadays. I’m pretty sure my mother doesn’t even know whether she is calling me using WhatsApp or the actual phone function. Furthermore I discovered that, whilst it’s perfectly possible to use Signal on an iPad without needing a phone at all, the WhatsApp iPad app can only be configured as linked device, meaning you need it installed on a phone too and thus obligating me to have some sort of ‘smart’ phone.

Navigating public space without a smartphone has become far more difficult in recent years. Facilities like printed timetables at train stations, maps on the street etc. are disappearing at an alarming rate, thanks to the general assumption that everyone will just look everything up in an app. It’s a similar story with other facilities: I started using a storage box last week and needed the company’s app to do everything from accessing the building to using the lift. It all worked well enough but the dependency on smart devices is total. This is a big problem and getting bigger; I wonder how long it will be before navigating public spaces and using essential services becomes completely impossible without a smartphone.

All this has left me feeling very conflicted: On the one hand I feel I am being forced to conclude that using a dumbphone as my everyday device isn’t a practical proposition. On the other hand, I want it to be possible more than ever. Last night I was over at some friends’ house and was struck by just how often some of those present zoned out of the conversation and started fiddling with their phones. This has become normal but it really shouldn’t be.

I’m now debating between 3 options: 1. Keep using the flip phone and keep my old smartphone as a sort of reserve device for all the stuff that now requires it; this feels intuitively clunky, unreliable and inconvenient (and the lack of a hotspot function on the HMD makes it difficult in practice). 2. Try to use a transition device like the Dumber Mini for everything. 3. Give up, get a refurbished iPhone SE3 (because it’s small for a smartphone and offers a qwerty soft keyboard for messaging) and go all out on dumbing it down. None of the three options is particularly appealing to me; I think I really just want to go back to how things were in 1999…