I Love Dumbphones

these days rocking the w890i such a classic

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Sony_Ericsson_W890i_%28Mocha_Brown%29%2C_front_and_back.jpg/1200px-Sony_Ericsson_W890i_%28Mocha_Brown%29%2C_front_and_back.jpg

Very slick. Can you give us the sales pitch?

i'd love to rock a dumbphone but i'm worried there are a few things i've become too reliant on - directions and banking come to mind. i was always under the impression that people who successfully do this don't really have to worry about those things i.e. they are rich.

no shade on you corrs, i'm just jealous :)

tbh I've also got a smartphone, but I'm on a 7/7 schedule now, one week dumb, one week smart

such a relief

sometimes can't do without the GPS, so I bring the smartphone

have bought an extra sim but it's p cheap these days and I hardly use any data

sales pitch: one of the last "high-end" dumbphones, great build quality, aluminium casing, very small form factor, battery goes up to a week, only does calls and texts but that's the point

the OS is quite nice, clearly a lot of thought went into perfecting the Sony Ericsson system which is at its peak here, so it's nicer than the current dumphones which ime suffer a bit from lazy/cheap development

it's 16 years old and still running!

cost me next to nothing

that's really good info corrs, thanks. hope you don't mind if i ask a few questions? do you have two different sim cards / numbers? what do you notice that's positive while you're using the sony vs the smartphone?

I see a camera lens, yeah? Does it take acceptable pics? (not that's what you're buying it for, obv.)

xp sure!

two sim cards, two numbers

Sony has my old sim and number so people can contact me if something important is up, smartphone a new number I don't remember - but that's okay since the smartphone is running whatsapp, email, messenger etc.

it's a bit confusing but nice to be able to instantly switch without swapping sims

using the Sony is great because nobody really texts or calls me and it has no social media or browsing, so there's just no disturbances/distractions

I don't look up words or do searches when I read, I don't browse music all the time, I'm just there. It's nice. It's like things used to be.

I guess it's a mild form of digital detox, very gratifying

and then in turn I find when I'm on my smartphone week I also use that less

eventually I might go dumbphone full time and only pull out the smartphone for occasions when it's necessary (travelling, digital tickets, certain payment systems)

nice thx

glad to hear it's a good change for you.

thanks!

camera is fine but I'm not using it

I had a phone like this ~15 years ago (the K800/K790i) and took photos with it, here's Will Sheff from Okkervil River in 2008

https://i.imgur.com/hdZ09e1.jpeg

I was looking at stuff like this insanely expensive Swiss dumphone https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/

but ultimately the old Sony Ericsson seems the better choice for me

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/tsYAAOSw84ljdQRq/s-l1600.webp

The Samsung C3350, it was waterproof, dustproof and the battery lasted a week. I had one of these until about 2017. Was gutted when the speaker and mic stopped working and ended up downgrading to a smart phone.

wish i could find a dumbphone with good quality GROUP TEXT support (i don't have massive group text threads, but when my kid's friend's parents text a few of us at once, it is annoying/dealbreaking if everything gets split into separate messages or the texts simply don't come through). also good T9.

i've had about 5 dumbphones in the past decade, and not happy with any of them. paid a fortune for a Sunbeam a year or two ago, but still find it's unreliable and not very good. problem i've had with old ones (i bought a Razr at one point) is that they don't always work on the modern networks.

time for a jitterbug!

My Samsung S4 mini is basically one of these now. Android 4.7, Play Store access dropped off years ago. But it does what I need - calls, texts, music player, terrible camera in a pinch. I work in IT and look at screens all day at work. I don't want to be doing so outside of work (said while looking at ILX on a 27 inch monitor).

kinda funny that the beautiful Punkt phone (designed by Jasper Morrison!)doesn't seem to work on the Verizon network

Just sayin', it's amazingly easy to buy a low-to-midrange smartphone and use it as a dumbphone. Just turn off the GPS and don't download any apps. Use it for calls, texts, music and the camera. Disable or ignore the rest. I say low-to-midrange mainly because the fancier the phone, the harder it is to justify crippling it.

good quality GROUP TEXT support

100%. i had a dumb phone until 2018 despite being very poor at the time. it seems to have only gotten harder to live without a smart phone since then, so i have hesitated to go back to dumb, and i think the "threaded" texts thing is a huge part of it. fortunately however i have a laptop and i prefer it for most of my online activity (which i think is a typical millennial quality?)

but most of the time when people are texting me links, etc., i fwd them to myself and use the messages app on my laptop to open them and view them in a browser or in spotify. i don't have any social media apps on my phone -- just a dictionary app, translator, itunes, spotify, maps, banking thing, and a few others. actively limiting my phone time has a discernible effect on my wellbeing.

i was always under the impression that people who successfully do this don't really have to worry about those things i.e. they are rich.

i definitely aspire to something like this. maybe not wealth exactly but a degree of autonomy in my life where this is possible

i have looked at ILX in a web browser on a phone but have only ever posted from a web browser on a computer

I have a samsung and nearly everyone I know has apple, and the two just don't get along... Apple purposely downgrades the quality of videos & audio sent to non-apple hardware, so I just see a blurry mess with some distorted scraping sounds

I've had the same iPhone 4s for twelve years and it's basically degenerated to a dumbphone. I can't even get the browser to access Gmail anymore. I'm happy with it as long as I can keep finding battery replacements.

It's also a solidly built device. It's survived a lot of drops over the years without a single crack.

In the UK there is a bit of a movement to stop kids having smartphones (to some degree) - it's pretty common for kids to have them from age 10. I read some article where the kids had a properly locked down phone - so, WhatsApp (which everyone uses in the UK) could only access pre-determined group chats and contacts, they could use calendar, maps, make calls etc but no social media apps, no browser etc. This seems a good idea to me for kids.