I'm hopelessly hanging on to my N900; ancient OS on obsolete hardware. Neo900 gives me some chance of being able to carry this thing around for a couple of years longer.
But: I will never own a personal (not for development) Android or iPhone. They're bad products dominated by vendors who hate their own customers, and plot against them in order to enable business strategies based on restricting choice.
Right now, with this 'healthy' market of 2 vendors (for how many billion people?), dumbphone here I come...
Not the healthy ones. Healthy ones have a wide variety of choices, and the competition nipping at your heels keeps user-hating features out of the product. Right now the two smartphone operating systems are being made by two companies who are in court for colluding on hiring. That's the worst possible market, and as you would expect, it produces trash.
One thing I'm looking forward to with my future dumbphones are how disposable they are if they turn out to be horrible.
"Shopping around" among dentists is virtually impossible. I can have only the most superficial and largely useless opinion of a dentist until I actually allow them in my mouth, at which point the deal is done. This is not a "healthy market" comparable to anything we're talking about here.
Ditto laser eye surgery and pretty much anything else remotely medical in nature.
i tried that for a good long while; it was a great phone when i got it, and even after it started bothering me that the touchscreen was less than responsive, i enjoyed the OS enough that i stuck to it. however, there were two major bugs that it was clear would never be fixed after nokia EOLed it:
* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped
* the gps started taking anywhere from 30 minutes to never to get a lock
the gps bug finally made me say "okay, i can't deal with this any more" and get an android.
GPS went completely dead for me probably two years ago. Huge bummer. Happened at the same time I started to have motorscooter problems (primary mode of transportation) and until I fix those, it's not critical.
Thinking about getting another from ebay, but I don't know how to make sure I don't get one of the Hong Kong forgeries (burnt by that once before.)
>* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped
This has always been due to overmultitasking for me. I keep my processlist pretty lean and don't install a lot of daemons - and I haven't missed a call due to that for a few years now.
Don't give up on android yet, it's just a dumb linux and despite vendor plots you can make it into dumb android like this guy did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_-jQc53jw Cyanogen mod is going in the "smart" direction, but a mod could go in the other direction too.
I heard that Jolla isn't compatible with US broadband, and it turned out not to be as open as I need. They've promised that their next phones will move more in that direction, though.
One of my hopes is that Jolla will come through, and my other is that Maemo might be successfully rebased onto mainline Debian rather than crazy, un-upgradable Debian.
Jolla has UX components that are not open, but overall it should be more open than Meego/Maemo. Jolla is supposedly downstream of Mer. There's probably not enough that runs both Sailfish and Mer to work out exactly what you get with each one and how closely related they are, or whether Mer will function better or worse than AOSP as a related open project.
Although I do agree that disconnecting with 'dumbphones' mitigate your risk of easy distractions, I do not agree, however that the 'dumbphone' user is in fact better off with any advantage over a smartphone user. One can easily compare the personal computer to the mega computers we used to have that used to take up a whole room. If there was a consensus to retreat and not embrace new technology then we may be still in a day without personal computers. Innovation would have stagnated and seized to evolve. Whether or not this individual decides to ever embrace a smartphone he may find himself forced to eventually embrace the smartphone as 'dumbphones' begin to be obsolete just as fixed car phones or beepers have become.
I don't think most people stick with "dumbphones" out of ideological primitivism, but rather out of disillusionment with the current choices that are available.
A major advantage of dumphones over smartphones is battery life.
Hence why I'm using combination of a dumbphone (that I must charge weekly) and a 7'' wifi tablet. This gives me best of both world and also makes it easier to 'disconnect' from the twitter addiction while staying reachable for emergencies.
I've had a friend do this. He had all the smart phones from Palm ones up through the iPhone and then just decided no more. He's got a basic flip phone that's cheap and the battery lasts forever. Features include talking, sms and a calculator.
He's more than able to afford any phone out there, but just doesn't like the constant connection. He does own an iPod Touch that he uses on occasion with wifi, but mostly keeps it in his bag.
+ No email--no, fuck you, you can't bug me during dinner because of something that just occurred to you.
+ No touchscreen--I can text without looking at my phone because I can feel the buttons.
+ It actually works as a phone, comfortably.
+ Battery lasts many days without issue.
+ I don't have to worry about it running arbitrary programs or getting viruses.
+ My old Nokia candybar was basically indestructible and waterproof. Even if it broke, replacing it was dirt cheap.
Indeed you can; but it's a generally unpleasant experience. The original poster might not have noticed this; and it was a nice help to show them that it couldn't be seen. In the future they may take that into consideration when posting information with the <pre> tag :)
I'm not a fan of cell phones at all, even dumb ones. I hate being interrupted, being taken out of the zone, when I'm enjoying things. So I don't take the phone I have with me. I leave it in the car. And its permanently on silent.
It might be a bit selfish but I'll return your call when I feel like it, or not at all... generally its easier just to stop in and see someone face to face to resolve things.
The only reason I currently have a smart phone is work got annoyed with me and purchased me one (and a monthly contract), as I build and maintain our company mobiles apps. Suppose I should have emotive and behavioural affiliation with I'm building :) couldn't really win that argument. I'm looking forward to the day I leave and I can hand the phone back TBH... although I'm sure my other half isn't LOL bet I loose that argument as well.
Still hasn't changed my behaviour though. The only thing that has is the camera. I used to lug around heavier larger cameras, the small form factor smart phone cameras are nice.
You don't have to leave it in the car, to prevent it from interrupting you. Silent + no vibrate. And it is nice to be able to place a call anytime, nearly anywhere.
The problem with silent+no vibrate is that interruption still exists. I often take my phone out of my pocket when sitting for dinner, or just randomly when I become aware its there.
What I really should do, and might do after writing this is trying and balance the notification messages. reduce them to have no context at all, hopefully I wont accidentally read them.
But the real problem is once I have a problem on my mind it bugs me to I solve it. It takes over my thought processes and annoys me, and when this happens while I'm out on a stroll or out for dinner, I'll spend the rest of the evening thinking about it.
There's a variety of options. You could, for example, turn on and off email notifications completely, to the tune of your schedule. (You might need Tasker for that though)
One has to ask if this 'disconnection' is not compensated elsewhere (by getting distracted with the same things in other places, like laptops, and/or watching more TV, etc).
The important thing is what you are doing with the newly discovered free time.
It won't. We have many decades of evidence that 'back-to-basics' will never be more than a niche movement. The world is very large, and Google, Apple and co, are much more vested in the folks coming 'up' (3rd world developing) than in the tiny minority of people who can even afford to think about back to basics.
Indeed, I feel like I'm one of the few people that uses my phone almost entirely as a tool. I don't use any social network for entertainment (only for messaging), and though I do use it browse the web, my use there is largely negligible.
However, I do get a HUGE amount of use out of my phone as a tool. I handle email, keep notes, use the camera for notes, manage files using Dropbox, and listen to music/podcasts (which help me be productive). I don't feel like phones are a bad thing.
I'm one of those people. I don't have a smartphone and don't want one. My phone is the cheapest piece of shit Nokia I could find. The online shop I buy computer stuff from had it on sale. I paid something like 15 EUR for it; completely unlocked, no carrier contract and the like, and got a couple of spare batteries for it.
For the lack of a better word, it's perfect. It can use it to talk to people and send SMS messages, which is precisely what I need a phone for. E-mail and Facebook happens on my workstation (or on my laptop if I'm away); I am a programmer though, which means that at least one computer is bound to be on in my home at any given moment. Work e-mail happens only on my work computer, and anything work related happens during work hours. I'm paid to worry about work for exactly eight hours of day, after those eight hours are gone they can stick it.
I also get a good week of battery life (to the point that I actually end up frantically searching for the damned charger because I misplace it). No updates break my phone, because there aren't any. I can also write an SMS without developing arthritis. The only thing I'd upgrade it to is a dumbphone with QWERTY keyboard. I've had it for about two years. Prior to that I was using a Nokia 1100 whose charger broke at a time when they weren't so easily available outside E-Bay and the like and I decided it's really not worth it. The small SMS limit was also bugging me (I had room for 50 messages or so and I'd regularly forget to clear them up).
As for the "always connected" part, I really think part of it self-inflicted. I've had e-mail and IM clients with sound alerts, on broadband (or at least permanent) Internet connections for far longer than smartphones have been around. If I hear the e-mail chime and don't feel like checking my e-mail, I don't check it. I know the poor guy at the other end of the line can't see I'm reading and therefore can't answer his e-mail, but hey, it's the risk of remote communication. Facebook chat alert while I'm in the shower? I finish showering, then check it. This isn't really that a big deal. My friends know that if something is urgent, they can reach me on the phone at any hour of day or night.
I know "society is offended" nowadays if you don't answer their IMs immediately, but I'm really not friends with all society, only with a handful of people (which is why my Facebook friend list also has, well, a handful of people!)
The way I see it is that there is a clear overlap of functionality between phones and tablets. I'm of the opinion that owning a tablet, such as a Nexus 7, makes many of your smartphone's functions redundant. So why have both smart devices? Why not have one device that does the bulk of the work while the other does the few functions that are unique to it as a device?
To clarify, I haven't yet completely made the switch to a "dumbphone", but I'm getting there I think. I currently own the absolutely phenomenal, yet to-the-point, Nokia Lumia 520. Next step is something much more rudimentary.
The reason they have so much overlapping functionality is because they are built with the same general-purpose hardware & operating system. That saves money.
The reason both exist is because a big screen is great but it doesn't fit in your pocket (and it looks dumb when you hold it to your ear)
My quality of life would decrease significantly without Google Maps. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. are distracting fluff, but navigation is the killer app.
I live in Chicago. Google Maps knows when the bus is coming, and which buses to take to get somewhere quickly. I don't have to plan very far ahead or keep to a strict schedule to make certain trains, since I know I can just pull out my phone and figure out a reasonable way to get home when it's time.
As a student from another city, I have only enough understanding of the geography to read Google Maps critically - for the details, it's indispensable.
Just uninstalling Facebook might be a nice middle route though.
Chicago is easy. It's laid out on a grid with a very few diagonal arteries. Texting CTABUS XXXX to 41411(where XXXX is the stop number) tells you when the next bus is coming.
There's only a couple of trains, and they shouldn't be very hard to get a handle on.
All of this is easy for me to say (having been born in Chicago), but there's really not a lot to memorize. It's no New York.
Edit: Here's a tip; memorize the major East-West boulevards on the North side (their order, if not their number.) The city is Cartesian, and that helps a lot with the conversion.
Yeah, but I don't have bus stop locations memorized (except around campus), and the most efficient route depends on exactly when you're traveling. Having Google figure this out for me is really convenient.
I have a nokia 301 that I bought for the smaller form factor, good battery life and some international use, and found that I used it a lot more for many of the reasons listed in the article. If I need to, I can still check my email/the weather/bus times, but every now and then I find myself switching back to my smartphone for the same reasons you list.
Not having maps is extremely limiting. Sure, if I'm going a few places I can check google maps beforehand, plan out a route, and get to my destination. The flexibility to deviate from that is completely lost, and why I have to alternate between the two phones.
For what it's worth, if battery life is important, my Note 3--about as far as you can get from a dumbphone--has amazing battery life. The battery meter barely goes down after an entire day. I occasionally don't charge it for two days and it's still green and going strong. It's literally never died on me. And I don't do anything particularly to keep the battery life up, like reducing screen brightness.
> Good, but other tests say it dies after 9 hours of browsing.
I wouldn't really know, because never have I been in a situation where I actually used my phone nonstop for 9 hours. =]
For my typical usage, the battery will last several days at least and probably a bit more if I put more effort into reducing battery consumption. I actually don't know how long it'll last since it's never died. Definitely not two weeks, but long enough for me to not really worry about the battery life.
All that said, I can definitely see the appeal of a phone that lasts two weeks. I think the Note 3 sits at a decent compromise between that and my old phone, a Galaxy S3, which could barely last 8 hours (of typical, very intermittent usage).
Regarding battery life, I'd be curious to know how a modern smart phone would fare if you used it as infrequently as a dumbphone. When truly idle my nexus 5 seems to drain very little; it's the fact that it's so useful (and in turn so frequently used) that seems to be the issue here.
I understand why you say this, but I think this is not exactly the issue. I do carry an internet-capable device, whenever I might need one (i.e. less often than you would think).
If I were to carry a smartphone for this purpose then I would get a worse experience than I do on a larger screen, and it would hinder my ability to use telephony services when I need them.
For my needs, those services do not belong in one device.
One feature I noticed in moving from a developing country (Pakistan) to a developed one (Canada) was how horrible city structures were in Canada. In Lahore (8+ million people) it's easy to tell someone visiting the city for the first time how to get from point A to B. No one uses smartphones for maps, because they don't need to. Buses are usually so frequent you don't need to wait more than 10 min.
In Canada, I see everyone using Maps to navigate because the cities are structured so bad it's hard for even the natives to navigate.
Wow, I honestly would have never thought that cities would have better (easier to navigate) layouts in countries like Pakistan. I am very interested in learning some details on what exactly you mean by this. :)
So I was specifically talking about moving from place to place without the need for maps. I am only comparing with Calgary and the greater Toronto area (not Toronto city). I am sure other cities in NA are different.
One reason is that Lahore is divided into gated housing authorities (which is bad for a lot of other reasons) but to get to your destination you just need directions to the the gated community. One inside, everything is neatly divided into grid structured blocks and numbered streets which are easy to navigate.
Calgary's streets have names not numbers. (Erin Grove, SE) tells me almost nothing about where the street is located. Even if I were a native I would need a map for unfamiliar streets.
Also, because people in Lahore are generally poor (most people don't have cars) and not very literate, the city grows in a way that they can navigate. Nothing to be proud of, but that is probably the reason I would say Lahore is 'better' designed.
That's quite a generalization you're making. Most of Montreal is served by 10 minut buses - that is, most time between two buses is 10 minutes. And there are buses 24/7 on big streets. And there's the metro. And there's the train if you want to go on either shore.
I never spoke about the transit system in Canada. I am Calgary at the moment, and even though there is definite room for improvement, it's fairly reasonable. (avg bus time here is >20min though)
Lahore has four levels of transit system available. There is a cross-city Metro bus system (which has a dedicated overhead road for itself so effectively a train). There are big buses which run long routes. There are shorter vans which run shorter routes. There are 'route'-rickshaws which even run even shorter routes. And if you are rich, there is a fifth option of getting a taxi-rickshaw at 10x price.
All this makes the system extremely robust (if bus is late you can eg. take a two van combo), and because all 4 systems compete with each other the transit system is time efficient and cheap.
1 USD ~ 100 PKR. Minimum wage is 10k PKR and typical college educated people earn 20k on their first job.
So minimum bus/van/route-rickshaw fare is 15 PKR. Might have gone up to 20 PKR since I was home. Max goes up to about 50-60 PKR. (you pay for how far you want to go).
taxi-rickshaws can cost anywhere from 30 PRK (1 km) to 600 PKR cross city (20-30). Depends on from where to where you are going, time of the day, and your ability to haggle.
I can totally relate to this! I noticed this exact same phenomenon when I visited Seattle from Bangalore, India. Even today whenever I have to visit a new place I make sure to get the general direction right and then just ask people.
I wouldn't put it down to bad city planning though. From my limited experience of visiting Seattle (about 3 weeks) I sensed that it's got more to do with people don't want to be bothered and left alone. Where as in India if I ask one person for direction I get at least half a dozen people telling me how to get there, which bus to take and what not!
Well I had the exact opposite experience. I am from France and I made a two month internship in Bangalore. If there is one thing we agree with my collegues who went there is that it was awful to find your way. Even cabs/auto-rickshaws have great difficulties to bring from a point A to a point B if you do not know yourself the exact path. The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city. The indications in the street were hard to find and see. I suppose it might be because of what we are used to from where where we are from.
That is actually true. Not every cab driver knows in minute detail every place in the city, or might know them by different names. All I said was that if someone gives you verbal directions to someplace it's easy to get there because the city structure is simple.
> Even cabs/auto-rickshaws have great difficulties to bring from a point A to a point B if you do not know yourself the exact path.
Cabs and auto-rickshaws in Bangalore are notorious for swindling huge sums of money by pretending that they know nothing about the city where in reality they know every nook and corner. They do this so that they can take you all over the place and on top of that bill you exorbitant amounts. And if you are a westerner then just don't go anywhere near them unless you know the exact route to take!
>The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city.
This is definitely not the case as the public transport cover just about every part of the city, even where autos hesitate to take. It's just that you need at least a month to figure out the routes, buses, transits etc., which gives the perception of non-existent public transport. I lived in Bangalore for 7 years before I started using public transport and despite being a local, Kannada being my mother tongue, it took me about a month to get it right.
From my personal limited experience of visiting various metros in India I'm fairly confident that Bangalore has the largest public bus transportation in India.
>The indications in the street were hard to find and see.
That's probably because there aren't any :). There are very few on arterial roads but even they aren't reliable as the one-way traffic rules change very so often!
I'm not sure I'd put this down to "horrible city structures".
Frequency of public transport is typically proportional to the population density. People are more likely to want to know the time of the next bus/train/tram when the cost of missing it is a 20 minute wait.
Managing population density is definitely part of city planning and I'd suggest limiting it has a more beneficial impact on quality of life than more frequenct public transport.
I live in one of the most denstly populated areas on earth and for me at least, the benefit of having a train interval of < 2 minutes does not offset the downside of having no space. E.g.:
- Peak train density >6 people per sq meter (1.8 sq ft per person)
- Peak urban density ~130,000 people per sq km (333,000 per sq mile)
Navigation is pretty handy, but the thing I really love about a smartphone is having a decent portable camera always with me. To quickly take a snap to share with family (mms, email or social media), when you otherwise would have missed that is pretty cool.
With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."
My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.
>With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."
With a generic "smartphone" you do, with an iPhone you just swipe up from the bottom right corner. It's nicely sandboxed outside the lock screen - you can see the photos you just took, but to review other photos you need to enter your PIN.
'Opportunistic technology' has applications in the classroom.
I have an old OS Blackberry Bold and I use the camera in class to photo student work and email it to a webmail account in-lesson then pop it on projector. I also use music player with 3.5mm lead to play podcasts &c. Fairly quick to use. Students encouraged to photo screens/whiteboards and email them in &c.
As a more mature (cough) person, I make limited personal use of social media and tend not to have very high traffic. The 'smartish' aspect is all data collection.
As a student from another city, I have only enough
understanding of the geography to read Google Maps
critically - for the details, it's indispensable.
Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7 years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google Maps.
People used to have maps, or just go out and explore new places. Not only learn the streets, but find great restaurants, coffee shops, stores, meet new and interesting people.
I am amazed daily at how these things have instilled learned helplessness into people in such a short time span.
I'm guessing students were less bold with CTA and took more cabs, or else avoided going out unless they knew the could afford a lengthy adventure getting home.
It wasn't impossible before, but it's certainly easier.
Argue the convenience is not worth the privacy costs, but don't suggest the convenience is trifling. Sure, these tasks were all possible, but it's clear that a smart phone can replace your map, bus schedule, train schedule, subway map, Zagat guide—in many cases not only is it a substitute but a patent improvement.
I'll be off your lawn in a moment, but first, you might want to consider that just because something can be done the old way doesn't mean that that's superior, that smartphones are in fact very good at showing you new places to go, and that "wanting machines to do tasks that machines are better at than humans" and "helplessness" are not synonymous.
So? Using a calculator probably degrades your ability to do sums in your head, yet a calculator allows many people to do sums they wouldn't be able to do just in their heads.
Storytelling is/was a great human tradition, perhaps the defining one in a literal sense. It's becoming extinct because of literacy. Today it's considered an eccentric pursuit.
That doesn't mean literacy is bad or that campfire stories repeated and evolved for generations are better than novels or films. But, oral storytelling as art or culture has characteristics that just aren't present in novels just like novels have characteristics that aren't present in TV shows.
If you are willing to be more abstract about it, you might compare it to working as an Apple engineer and collecting edible roots near a stream. The former is clearly superior as a way of feeding your family. The latter still has certain human qualities that are beneficial to people and worth preserving.
As we move forward we lose some things which may be valuable. Nostalgia and the desire to preserve is not a bad thing.
I'm in my 40s - so I've spent most of my life using "normal" maps.
For me - they suck. I have a lousy sense of direction. Despite actively trying to improve it for decades I regularly got lost. Not lost in the fun-exploring-new-places sort of way - but lost in the fuck-me-going-to-miss-the-last-train-home sort of way. I used to regularly schedule in hours of extra time for "just in case" scenarios. I used to avoid unfamiliar locations and over-plan trips to extreme degrees. I never wandered off the beaten track in the middle of the day - coz I could easily spend hours finding my way back.
I now go to strange places with almost zero planning. I can just pick a random direction for a walk and be confident that I can come back again. They have saved me probably weeks of prep time and contingency time at this point, and have let me go to many places that I would have otherwise never have visited. They have lifted a huge weight of worry from my shoulders every time I had to get from A to B.
So for me google maps et al have freed me from the learned helplessness of traditional maps.
Without smartphones does not mean using paper maps. It means that featurephones would have eventually converged with offline GPS devices -- the Garmins and TomToms of the world.
In many ways, this would have been a better model for the navigating consumer. GPS devices operated on a one-time purchase model -- no subscription, no contracts, no data caps. Maps were shipped with the device, and many came with free lifetime updates. Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.
There are also broader implications. Without smartphones, AT&T and Verizon would have lost a lucrative revenue stream. Their best choice for deploying capital would have been to build fiber to the home. Not a bad trade -- smartphones for gigabit broadband in every house.
With wireless at a technological plateau, maybe T-Mobile and Sprint could have caught up. Perhaps we'd have seen more robust competition to the duopoly, and lower prices.
This is alternate history. But it's alternate history along the lines of Douglas North, who dared to question the economic benefits of railroads.
> Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.
It's a natural broadcasting application. You really don't need point-to-point. Eventually when DTV came along, it might've been datacast over ATSC.
A lot of technology is path-dependent. We got smartphones, so everything went one way. Without smartphones, the very same clever people would've been working on other solutions.
It would have been different -- worse in some ways, better in others.
Yep, they would have added more and more features to these increasingly powerful, increasingly generalized electronic devices that fit in your pocket until... Oops, look at that, smartphones all over again.
Today's featurephones have GPS, navigation, mail, IM, sometimes even installable apps. In 2006, we would have considered them smartphones.
If you read my original post, you will notice that I focus on the mobile broadband connection as the distinguishing feature of a smartphone. It is this feature that kept people locked into cellular contracts, raised the barriers to entry in the wireless world, ended Verizon's FiOS deployment, and ushered in the always-connected smartphone world that we live in today.
Technological realities are often more path-dependent than we like to pretend. Pay TV could be dominated by wired cable television (US), or broadcast satellite (Europe and Asia). We could've ended up in a Minitel world or an Internet world. A lot depends on business decisions and other non-tech dynamics.
In our case, it was the iPhone/AT&T combination that determined our path. That is why I used the definition that AT&T uses in exploring what it meant to live in a world without "smartphones." AT&T refuses to activate smartphones on its postpaid network without a data plan. Any phone that doesn't require a data plan is considered a featurephone.
I'm afraid not, no. In 2006, a smartphone was something like a Palm Treo or an HTC TyTN. In fact, that's what a smartphone has been for over a decade. Even the price points have remained similar.
The iPhone was an important milestone in smartphone development, most critically with regard to usability, but it was initially a step backwards in many ways compared to smartphones that had already been on the market for years, and lacked even 3G that had been available in other smartphones for some time.
> Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7 years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google Maps.
Actually 10 years ago I got lost all the time, would ask my way to people with very vague memory and not much of a talent to give direction, in the worst cases I would pay a taxi after a while to bring me back to a known point, and got taxed huge amounts when the taxi guy would also get lost because the address wasn't correct.
Some people (i.e me) are really bad at orienting and reading maps. Before Google Maps I had a "dumbphone" with a GPS app, and it changed my life (even when going new places I could go back in a predictable amount of time. Imagine the impact).
> Amazing that those people in ancient times--of what, 5-7
> years ago?--could survive without smartphones and Google
> Maps
And by extension, people just 100 years ago survived (sometimes) without antibiotics. Or ATMs. Or television. Or commercial flight. Isn't amazing how helpless people have become?
I went back to a dumbphone and those rare times I need a map (unfamiliar city) I either write down directions before I leave or just flip open the laptop.
There really are many other apps that are useful besides just Google Maps though. It's great to have a phone that can play music for the gym, have an app like venmo for small transactions when you forget cash, or a portable e-reader for the bus or train, or uber for just-in-case situations... and many more. All of these aren't indispensable, but they just make life so much easier and better.
I definitely agree with you that removing social network apps is a great way to improve productivity a bit. And of course, if you don't need the apps listed above, then, yes, there isn't much point in paying extra for a smartphone. But please realize that many people are willing to pay for the significant convenience that a smartphone affords them.
Not using a smartphone just because of the battery life or durability though is silly. A specialized case will nearly solve both problems. There are privacy concerns and productivity concerns and price concerns, sure. But this is the future - and we should be trying to address those concerns and change them for the better, not fight smartphones altogether.
I'd say it's all about learning how to avoid misusing a powerful tool. I bet when we discovered fire we initially burned down a few forests by accident before we discovered, say, safety matches. Or when we discovered the wheel as a method of transportation we probably careened of a cliff here and there before we developed brakes and crumple zones.
I've heard a number of my friends complain about facebook, initially, and later about smartphones. While I understand that the 'pull' of checking what's going on in your social network, or checking out the latest funny picture posted on reddit, I think the solution is not (necessarily( to get off facebook or get a dumbphone, but rather to learn how to responsibly use a potentially highly addictive tool.
Perhaps this is a problem that only plagues these kinds of transitional periods. I've noticed, for example, that my younger sister (~15) is absolutely addicted to her phone and whatsapp, and my parents, who are generally quite responsible and firm in how they raised us, don't even really seem to notice the problem. And perhaps that's because it's so new, like television was once.
Smartphones are devices made for content consumption with a phone added on top.
Not consuming content would be misusing it. Like buying an expensive TV to watch the news once a day.
Why waste money on things you won't utilize most of the time?
First off, I think you're misinterpreting what I mean with 'misuse'. I meant it in the context of 'health', and I don't really care what the intended purpose was. The television, for example, is a great invention and I love watching shows and movies in the comfort of my home. You could say the 'use' of a tv is that you watch as much as possible so advertisers can make money. I think we can still agree that watching tv all day is 'misuse' when it comes to your mental or physical health.
Second, 'content consumption' is a bit vague. I'd say a smartphone is worth having because so many people use whatsapp instead of sms, because it has google maps, because I can check my trello board occasionally, because I can check the weather, and very frequently to find out how to get from A to B using public transport. None of that requires me to be constantly 'consuming', but it's still very useful.
In fact, For a full two years I had a smartphone (Nexus) with no data plan, and it was still worth having. It functioned as my calendar, notepad, dictation device, and even maps (although it is less useful offline).
I never understood why people say "I don't need a watch, I have a phone in my pocket!" You know why watches were invented, right? Personally I've been thinking about getting a pager.
With a watch, I can read the time in 1/10 of a second, I don't have to dig it out of my pocket and turn it on, I can surreptitiously check the time, I can read it without my glasses on, I can read it out of the corner of my eye, it doesn't bounce around annoyingly in my pocket when I jog, it lasts a year on a charge, it works on an airplane, I can read it when my hands are full, I can check the time without taking my hands off the steering wheel, it works in the rain, etc.
The only thing I don't like about a watch is I have to remember to take it off when working with rotating machinery.
I use a "dumbphone", although for me it's not a political or psychological thing, I just hardly ever used the smart functionalities of my android smartphone back when I had one. The only feature I sometimes miss is GPS localisation and google maps.
On the other hand a smartphone is expensive, you always risk breaking it/getting it stolen. Nobody will bother stealing my 20euros Samsung and if I get it gets destroyed I'll just buy a couple more. Oh and as TFA mentions the battery lasts for like 10 days of normal use.
The irony is that my job involves porting Android to embedded devices.
I would be in the same boat, but I have found that a Moto G with a prepaid SIM is a good middle point. Just cheap enough phone I can afford to have it stolen, and still with the Smartphone features that make me want and need a smartphone. (Navigation and messaging).
Yeah, I haven't looked into cheap smartphones (I bought my current dumbphone maybe two years ago and things move quickly).
But of course at time goes buy the low end phones get more and more featureful. That being said I doubt the Moto G has 10 days battery life and is as solid as my current brick phone.
Still, it's a good recommendation, I'll look into it when my current phone stops working.
It absolutely does not have 10 day battery, but it does have one of the best battery lives of the crop. If mostly left asleep, it could last several days for sure.
I do grimace more when I drop it onto a stone floor, but it has already survived that once.
My last smartphone was an N900. If I'm going to buy a portable computer, well... I'd actually like some modicum of control over that computer out of the box.
However my primary telecommunications device is a cheap flip phone.
I swear there needs to be a recovery/assistance group for former N900 users. I haven't been able to find a device to replace it yet and yes I know about the Neo900.
I got rid of my smartphone, that cost me $5/year to run, now I just carry a radio, mp3 player, book of maps, gps receiver, flashlight, barometer, alarm clock, diary, address book, newspaper, tv remote, and camera. Much less distracting
I carry a wallet, keys, and sometimes a phone, but not always. Not usually.
Most of the time I just, you know, use land lines at the places where I'm at.
If for some desperate reason, there's something that prevents me from tolerating a ~30 drive without in-situ communication, I mull over the idea of carrying a phone, and in the minutes it takes me to arrive at a decision, I usually just call the person I need to speak to, and square away the details on the spot.
Yeah, people have to try three or four numbers to get a hold of me sometimes, but like, that's their problem.
I already have mini hear attacks if I misplaced my phone because of all the data on it. My mails, my password manager etc. I really don't know if I would add my keys and my money to this. If lost, you literally are left with nothing.
I had a dumb phone for a very long time, but after trying to navigate a cross-country road trip with a flip phone, I succumbed and upgraded to an iPhone. I can kinda be persuaded by the argument that we give up some of the adventure of traveling when we have the full details of the road before us, but I am more persuaded by having a gluten-free family who will need to eat at some point in the next hours and dammit, where is next Chipotle?
It is also interesting to me that many of the folks in the article admit it's not a problem with smartphones, but rather their own shortcomings--they can't not be distracted.
I turned the data plan off on my smartphone about 1 month after I bought my first tablet. What sucks is finding a phone, in today's market, having a decent screen plus keyboard for texting. It's looking like Im going to have to buy a blackberry Q10, even though, really, I'm overpaying for my actual needs. Anyone know of other more affordable options out there that don't make me look like I'm on the A-TEAM? Is it possible there's actually a really big opportunity for phone makers that's being missed here?
No clue if it's even available yet, but asha has a hardware keyboard and is fairly cheap. The Q10 is great though and personally I'd recommend it if you mainly use your phone for typing.
One distinct advantage that smartphones have over simple phones is the ability to make unlimited, essentially free [1] phone calls and messages to people who may not be in the same region as you are. Think Viber.
It takes just one significant person in your life, who lives outside your range of unlimited-call phone plans, for this to be a serious argument in favour of using a smartphone.
[1] At the cost of a data plan which also takes care of internet needs.
There's a need for an iPhone Nano (and like competitors).
Most dumbphones sold now seem designed to urge owners toward smartphones. They're thick (an inch?!), the UX is stupid (staring at Verizon), syncing with anything is a hassle, and include other features as bullet points but barely useable.
They should be very thin (less than an iPhone 5), small as practical for holding, elegant attention-to-detail calling nuances, auto-sync with other devices where appropriate, and anything else it does should be limited and excellent. Voice dialing should be of high quality/accuracy. When on a call, should still show the time. There's a host of other nitpicky things that most phones suck at but are overlooked as the norm and no viable alternatives.
If I'm carrying around a tablet, why bother carrying a phone which is nothing more than the same thing shrunk? I'd rather a phone which is an excellent phone, and is aware of & connected with the other devices I'm around much of the day.
Dumbphone aficionado here too. I know full damn well I'd be a smartphone zombie glued to the thing constantly if I had one.
I do have an iPad which serves as a great middle ground, portable nearly full featured computing when I need it, but it's not quite so temptingly convenient to pull out and distract myself in the middle of a conversation or restaurant.
(Actually my phone is a fairly well provisioned feature phone, an AT&T Z431 with a browser and email and GPS and camera, but I don't have a data plan to use any of it. All I do is voice calls and text on AT&T's cheapo prepaid plan.)
- Phone calls
- SMS
- FM Radio
- Flashlight
- Snake
- 528h standby / 8h talking
- Casual apps: calculator, calendar, countdown, converter, ...
- SPEAKING CLOCK
- Can be used as a ball to play catch sports
My only cons are having just one alarm and having to little space for sms. Of course, it would be amazing being able to develop for it. There's absolutely a market for these phones outside of developing countries.
I have one too. It fell out of my pocket while biking last week, and then got run over by a Lexus SUV. Popped the battery back in and it was good as new.
The flashlight is handy too, major upgrade from my last dumb phone.
Charge by usb would be nice. I lost my nokia 1100 after 7 years of use (including dropping in a pond) and moved on to a spare samsung I had. If nokia came out with something with >500h of standby and charge by usb, I'd immediately give them an entire £10.
edit: also, I like the lack of SMS space - it decreases my reliance on the device. I write down the important stuff and purge the rest monthly. SMS is a rubbish format for keeping my brain in.
Interesting. This month I got my first ever smartphone, and only because I found out about Republic Wireless and their $10/month plan with unlimited talk/text everywhere, but data on wifi only, using the awesome Moto X.
So now I can go for a walk/bike ride/drive and be off the grid for an hour or two, but I'm never far from a wifi network if I need it. I also save a lot of money each month.
Wow, I had heard of Republic Wireless but never really checked them out. I'm also a long-time "dumbphone" holdout but my Verizon Samsung candy-bar has about had it. Just recently its earpiece speaker failed so now I can only answer voice calls in speakerphone mode, which is often awkward. And I have recently been in a few situations where maps or navigation would have been a great convenience.
Republic's upcoming Moto G (April availability) looks ideal for me as a basic smartphone.
I wonder how many people who have "downgraded" phones do so, in all honesty, for the shock value for fashion's sake just for the attention.
Often they are the arty type who try to stand out from the crowd even though they have a nicely intellectual justification "I'm get too distracted, I lose out on quality of life". The cynic in me thinks they just want to be different.
I have never owned a smartphone, and I will hold out as long as I can. It is not a fashion statement, I do not care what others think about me. The nature of my work requires a lot of uninterrupted thinking, and I have a very addictive personality.
If anything, it would be nice to own a smartphone so my friends and colleagues will stop acting weird about it.
There's a ton of legit reasons to not have a smartphone.
Most of the "arty" types you see probably just can't afford one. As someone who over the years has lost their phone a couple times and dropped it many more times, no way am I going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a new one every time that happens.
I also don't own a smartphone because I already spend enough time at my computer, and doing all the same things on a tiny screen with no mouse/keyboard/etc. would feel like a massively downgraded experience.
For me, the only appealing features of a smart phone are tethering and GPS. I'm fine without them though. I moved to a new city ~6 months ago, and I already know my way around much better than most (especially useful because most of the city is not well documented on Google Maps / OpenStreetMap). Probably would not be the case if I had GPS everywhere.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadBut: I will never own a personal (not for development) Android or iPhone. They're bad products dominated by vendors who hate their own customers, and plot against them in order to enable business strategies based on restricting choice.
Right now, with this 'healthy' market of 2 vendors (for how many billion people?), dumbphone here I come...
One thing I'm looking forward to with my future dumbphones are how disposable they are if they turn out to be horrible.
Ditto laser eye surgery and pretty much anything else remotely medical in nature.
Chocolate is not a healthy market either: http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/01/why-so-little-candy-variety...
Orthodontia and laser eye surgery are examples of the types of healthy markets that flourish in the absence of over-regulation.
You also seem to be conflating the health of markets and some idiosyncratic issues of your own regarding discovering competent suppliers.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/orthodontist
or·tho·don·tics
a branch of dentistry that deals with helping teeth to grow straight
If we're not even going to argue about the same thing, I'm done here.
Whenever there are no individual participants large enough or enough participants colluding to cause regulatory capture.
The US isn't interested in healthy markets anymore.
Second worst.
* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped
* the gps started taking anywhere from 30 minutes to never to get a lock
the gps bug finally made me say "okay, i can't deal with this any more" and get an android.
Thinking about getting another from ebay, but I don't know how to make sure I don't get one of the Hong Kong forgeries (burnt by that once before.)
>* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped
This has always been due to overmultitasking for me. I keep my processlist pretty lean and don't install a lot of daemons - and I haven't missed a call due to that for a few years now.
Slides for hellaphone here http://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-20/dc-20-presentations/F...
Edit: Add slides link
One of my hopes is that Jolla will come through, and my other is that Maemo might be successfully rebased onto mainline Debian rather than crazy, un-upgradable Debian.
Hence why I'm using combination of a dumbphone (that I must charge weekly) and a 7'' wifi tablet. This gives me best of both world and also makes it easier to 'disconnect' from the twitter addiction while staying reachable for emergencies.
He's more than able to afford any phone out there, but just doesn't like the constant connection. He does own an iPod Touch that he uses on occasion with wifi, but mostly keeps it in his bag.
(Mobile users get it even worse.)
One day, one day!
That's why there's the "Mobile Data" button that disables syncing, etc (At least on Android Phones)
I also don't need to read every email or see every notification (I leave them to not make a sound)
Unfortunately even like this battery life is 2 days tops for a new battery
It might be a bit selfish but I'll return your call when I feel like it, or not at all... generally its easier just to stop in and see someone face to face to resolve things.
The only reason I currently have a smart phone is work got annoyed with me and purchased me one (and a monthly contract), as I build and maintain our company mobiles apps. Suppose I should have emotive and behavioural affiliation with I'm building :) couldn't really win that argument. I'm looking forward to the day I leave and I can hand the phone back TBH... although I'm sure my other half isn't LOL bet I loose that argument as well.
Still hasn't changed my behaviour though. The only thing that has is the camera. I used to lug around heavier larger cameras, the small form factor smart phone cameras are nice.
What I really should do, and might do after writing this is trying and balance the notification messages. reduce them to have no context at all, hopefully I wont accidentally read them.
But the real problem is once I have a problem on my mind it bugs me to I solve it. It takes over my thought processes and annoys me, and when this happens while I'm out on a stroll or out for dinner, I'll spend the rest of the evening thinking about it.
The important thing is what you are doing with the newly discovered free time.
I think at some point we'll look at smartphones the way we look at tobacco: a hard to quit, annoying habit…
Can't say I see that happening. As many users already mentioned smartphones add great value to people's day to day.
I was obviously exaggerating, still I think a better objection to myself would be that smartphones are not as bad for your health.
However, I do get a HUGE amount of use out of my phone as a tool. I handle email, keep notes, use the camera for notes, manage files using Dropbox, and listen to music/podcasts (which help me be productive). I don't feel like phones are a bad thing.
For the lack of a better word, it's perfect. It can use it to talk to people and send SMS messages, which is precisely what I need a phone for. E-mail and Facebook happens on my workstation (or on my laptop if I'm away); I am a programmer though, which means that at least one computer is bound to be on in my home at any given moment. Work e-mail happens only on my work computer, and anything work related happens during work hours. I'm paid to worry about work for exactly eight hours of day, after those eight hours are gone they can stick it.
I also get a good week of battery life (to the point that I actually end up frantically searching for the damned charger because I misplace it). No updates break my phone, because there aren't any. I can also write an SMS without developing arthritis. The only thing I'd upgrade it to is a dumbphone with QWERTY keyboard. I've had it for about two years. Prior to that I was using a Nokia 1100 whose charger broke at a time when they weren't so easily available outside E-Bay and the like and I decided it's really not worth it. The small SMS limit was also bugging me (I had room for 50 messages or so and I'd regularly forget to clear them up).
As for the "always connected" part, I really think part of it self-inflicted. I've had e-mail and IM clients with sound alerts, on broadband (or at least permanent) Internet connections for far longer than smartphones have been around. If I hear the e-mail chime and don't feel like checking my e-mail, I don't check it. I know the poor guy at the other end of the line can't see I'm reading and therefore can't answer his e-mail, but hey, it's the risk of remote communication. Facebook chat alert while I'm in the shower? I finish showering, then check it. This isn't really that a big deal. My friends know that if something is urgent, they can reach me on the phone at any hour of day or night.
I know "society is offended" nowadays if you don't answer their IMs immediately, but I'm really not friends with all society, only with a handful of people (which is why my Facebook friend list also has, well, a handful of people!)
To clarify, I haven't yet completely made the switch to a "dumbphone", but I'm getting there I think. I currently own the absolutely phenomenal, yet to-the-point, Nokia Lumia 520. Next step is something much more rudimentary.
The reason both exist is because a big screen is great but it doesn't fit in your pocket (and it looks dumb when you hold it to your ear)
I live in Chicago. Google Maps knows when the bus is coming, and which buses to take to get somewhere quickly. I don't have to plan very far ahead or keep to a strict schedule to make certain trains, since I know I can just pull out my phone and figure out a reasonable way to get home when it's time.
As a student from another city, I have only enough understanding of the geography to read Google Maps critically - for the details, it's indispensable.
Just uninstalling Facebook might be a nice middle route though.
There's only a couple of trains, and they shouldn't be very hard to get a handle on.
All of this is easy for me to say (having been born in Chicago), but there's really not a lot to memorize. It's no New York.
Edit: Here's a tip; memorize the major East-West boulevards on the North side (their order, if not their number.) The city is Cartesian, and that helps a lot with the conversion.
I recently visited SF and mostly used public transportation to get around. Google Maps was awesome.
Not having maps is extremely limiting. Sure, if I'm going a few places I can check google maps beforehand, plan out a route, and get to my destination. The flexibility to deviate from that is completely lost, and why I have to alternate between the two phones.
Battery life trumps navigation, for me, comfortably. If I'm lost after a long day, I need the option to phone my destination.
For comparison, I occasionally don't charge my phone for two weeks.
Edit: apologies for editing :)
I wouldn't really know, because never have I been in a situation where I actually used my phone nonstop for 9 hours. =]
For my typical usage, the battery will last several days at least and probably a bit more if I put more effort into reducing battery consumption. I actually don't know how long it'll last since it's never died. Definitely not two weeks, but long enough for me to not really worry about the battery life.
All that said, I can definitely see the appeal of a phone that lasts two weeks. I think the Note 3 sits at a decent compromise between that and my old phone, a Galaxy S3, which could barely last 8 hours (of typical, very intermittent usage).
If I were to carry a smartphone for this purpose then I would get a worse experience than I do on a larger screen, and it would hinder my ability to use telephony services when I need them.
For my needs, those services do not belong in one device.
In Canada, I see everyone using Maps to navigate because the cities are structured so bad it's hard for even the natives to navigate.
One reason is that Lahore is divided into gated housing authorities (which is bad for a lot of other reasons) but to get to your destination you just need directions to the the gated community. One inside, everything is neatly divided into grid structured blocks and numbered streets which are easy to navigate.
Calgary's streets have names not numbers. (Erin Grove, SE) tells me almost nothing about where the street is located. Even if I were a native I would need a map for unfamiliar streets.
Also, because people in Lahore are generally poor (most people don't have cars) and not very literate, the city grows in a way that they can navigate. Nothing to be proud of, but that is probably the reason I would say Lahore is 'better' designed.
Lahore has four levels of transit system available. There is a cross-city Metro bus system (which has a dedicated overhead road for itself so effectively a train). There are big buses which run long routes. There are shorter vans which run shorter routes. There are 'route'-rickshaws which even run even shorter routes. And if you are rich, there is a fifth option of getting a taxi-rickshaw at 10x price.
All this makes the system extremely robust (if bus is late you can eg. take a two van combo), and because all 4 systems compete with each other the transit system is time efficient and cheap.
So minimum bus/van/route-rickshaw fare is 15 PKR. Might have gone up to 20 PKR since I was home. Max goes up to about 50-60 PKR. (you pay for how far you want to go).
taxi-rickshaws can cost anywhere from 30 PRK (1 km) to 600 PKR cross city (20-30). Depends on from where to where you are going, time of the day, and your ability to haggle.
I wouldn't put it down to bad city planning though. From my limited experience of visiting Seattle (about 3 weeks) I sensed that it's got more to do with people don't want to be bothered and left alone. Where as in India if I ask one person for direction I get at least half a dozen people telling me how to get there, which bus to take and what not!
Cabs and auto-rickshaws in Bangalore are notorious for swindling huge sums of money by pretending that they know nothing about the city where in reality they know every nook and corner. They do this so that they can take you all over the place and on top of that bill you exorbitant amounts. And if you are a westerner then just don't go anywhere near them unless you know the exact route to take!
>The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city.
This is definitely not the case as the public transport cover just about every part of the city, even where autos hesitate to take. It's just that you need at least a month to figure out the routes, buses, transits etc., which gives the perception of non-existent public transport. I lived in Bangalore for 7 years before I started using public transport and despite being a local, Kannada being my mother tongue, it took me about a month to get it right.
From my personal limited experience of visiting various metros in India I'm fairly confident that Bangalore has the largest public bus transportation in India.
>The indications in the street were hard to find and see.
That's probably because there aren't any :). There are very few on arterial roads but even they aren't reliable as the one-way traffic rules change very so often!
Frequency of public transport is typically proportional to the population density. People are more likely to want to know the time of the next bus/train/tram when the cost of missing it is a 20 minute wait.
Managing population density is definitely part of city planning and I'd suggest limiting it has a more beneficial impact on quality of life than more frequenct public transport.
I live in one of the most denstly populated areas on earth and for me at least, the benefit of having a train interval of < 2 minutes does not offset the downside of having no space. E.g.:
- Peak train density >6 people per sq meter (1.8 sq ft per person)
- Peak urban density ~130,000 people per sq km (333,000 per sq mile)
With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."
My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.
With a generic "smartphone" you do, with an iPhone you just swipe up from the bottom right corner. It's nicely sandboxed outside the lock screen - you can see the photos you just took, but to review other photos you need to enter your PIN.
Sony smartphones work the same way
I have an old OS Blackberry Bold and I use the camera in class to photo student work and email it to a webmail account in-lesson then pop it on projector. I also use music player with 3.5mm lead to play podcasts &c. Fairly quick to use. Students encouraged to photo screens/whiteboards and email them in &c.
As a more mature (cough) person, I make limited personal use of social media and tend not to have very high traffic. The 'smartish' aspect is all data collection.
People used to have maps, or just go out and explore new places. Not only learn the streets, but find great restaurants, coffee shops, stores, meet new and interesting people.
I am amazed daily at how these things have instilled learned helplessness into people in such a short time span.
I'm guessing students were less bold with CTA and took more cabs, or else avoided going out unless they knew the could afford a lengthy adventure getting home.
It wasn't impossible before, but it's certainly easier.
1. http://phys.org/news/2010-11-reliance-gps-hippocampus-functi...
Storytelling is/was a great human tradition, perhaps the defining one in a literal sense. It's becoming extinct because of literacy. Today it's considered an eccentric pursuit.
That doesn't mean literacy is bad or that campfire stories repeated and evolved for generations are better than novels or films. But, oral storytelling as art or culture has characteristics that just aren't present in novels just like novels have characteristics that aren't present in TV shows.
If you are willing to be more abstract about it, you might compare it to working as an Apple engineer and collecting edible roots near a stream. The former is clearly superior as a way of feeding your family. The latter still has certain human qualities that are beneficial to people and worth preserving.
As we move forward we lose some things which may be valuable. Nostalgia and the desire to preserve is not a bad thing.
However, there are things that movies can do that plays definitely can't do, and the reverse is true as well.
I think that there's room for both!
For me - they suck. I have a lousy sense of direction. Despite actively trying to improve it for decades I regularly got lost. Not lost in the fun-exploring-new-places sort of way - but lost in the fuck-me-going-to-miss-the-last-train-home sort of way. I used to regularly schedule in hours of extra time for "just in case" scenarios. I used to avoid unfamiliar locations and over-plan trips to extreme degrees. I never wandered off the beaten track in the middle of the day - coz I could easily spend hours finding my way back.
I now go to strange places with almost zero planning. I can just pick a random direction for a walk and be confident that I can come back again. They have saved me probably weeks of prep time and contingency time at this point, and have let me go to many places that I would have otherwise never have visited. They have lifted a huge weight of worry from my shoulders every time I had to get from A to B.
So for me google maps et al have freed me from the learned helplessness of traditional maps.
In many ways, this would have been a better model for the navigating consumer. GPS devices operated on a one-time purchase model -- no subscription, no contracts, no data caps. Maps were shipped with the device, and many came with free lifetime updates. Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.
There are also broader implications. Without smartphones, AT&T and Verizon would have lost a lucrative revenue stream. Their best choice for deploying capital would have been to build fiber to the home. Not a bad trade -- smartphones for gigabit broadband in every house.
With wireless at a technological plateau, maybe T-Mobile and Sprint could have caught up. Perhaps we'd have seen more robust competition to the duopoly, and lower prices.
This is alternate history. But it's alternate history along the lines of Douglas North, who dared to question the economic benefits of railroads.
> Traffic data was broadcast over FM radio, and eventually mass-transit data might've been broadcast as well.
It's a natural broadcasting application. You really don't need point-to-point. Eventually when DTV came along, it might've been datacast over ATSC.
A lot of technology is path-dependent. We got smartphones, so everything went one way. Without smartphones, the very same clever people would've been working on other solutions.
It would have been different -- worse in some ways, better in others.
If you read my original post, you will notice that I focus on the mobile broadband connection as the distinguishing feature of a smartphone. It is this feature that kept people locked into cellular contracts, raised the barriers to entry in the wireless world, ended Verizon's FiOS deployment, and ushered in the always-connected smartphone world that we live in today.
Technological realities are often more path-dependent than we like to pretend. Pay TV could be dominated by wired cable television (US), or broadcast satellite (Europe and Asia). We could've ended up in a Minitel world or an Internet world. A lot depends on business decisions and other non-tech dynamics.
In our case, it was the iPhone/AT&T combination that determined our path. That is why I used the definition that AT&T uses in exploring what it meant to live in a world without "smartphones." AT&T refuses to activate smartphones on its postpaid network without a data plan. Any phone that doesn't require a data plan is considered a featurephone.
The iPhone was an important milestone in smartphone development, most critically with regard to usability, but it was initially a step backwards in many ways compared to smartphones that had already been on the market for years, and lacked even 3G that had been available in other smartphones for some time.
As someone who spent the majority of their life with only that option available, I very strongly doubt that.
Actually 10 years ago I got lost all the time, would ask my way to people with very vague memory and not much of a talent to give direction, in the worst cases I would pay a taxi after a while to bring me back to a known point, and got taxed huge amounts when the taxi guy would also get lost because the address wasn't correct.
Some people (i.e me) are really bad at orienting and reading maps. Before Google Maps I had a "dumbphone" with a GPS app, and it changed my life (even when going new places I could go back in a predictable amount of time. Imagine the impact).
At one point, earlier, people didn't even have paper maps, so why stop there?
You're conflating helplessness with convenience. Yes, people used to do things the hard way. Now we get to do them the easy way.
I definitely agree with you that removing social network apps is a great way to improve productivity a bit. And of course, if you don't need the apps listed above, then, yes, there isn't much point in paying extra for a smartphone. But please realize that many people are willing to pay for the significant convenience that a smartphone affords them.
Not using a smartphone just because of the battery life or durability though is silly. A specialized case will nearly solve both problems. There are privacy concerns and productivity concerns and price concerns, sure. But this is the future - and we should be trying to address those concerns and change them for the better, not fight smartphones altogether.
I've heard a number of my friends complain about facebook, initially, and later about smartphones. While I understand that the 'pull' of checking what's going on in your social network, or checking out the latest funny picture posted on reddit, I think the solution is not (necessarily( to get off facebook or get a dumbphone, but rather to learn how to responsibly use a potentially highly addictive tool.
Perhaps this is a problem that only plagues these kinds of transitional periods. I've noticed, for example, that my younger sister (~15) is absolutely addicted to her phone and whatsapp, and my parents, who are generally quite responsible and firm in how they raised us, don't even really seem to notice the problem. And perhaps that's because it's so new, like television was once.
Not consuming content would be misusing it. Like buying an expensive TV to watch the news once a day. Why waste money on things you won't utilize most of the time?
Second, 'content consumption' is a bit vague. I'd say a smartphone is worth having because so many people use whatsapp instead of sms, because it has google maps, because I can check my trello board occasionally, because I can check the weather, and very frequently to find out how to get from A to B using public transport. None of that requires me to be constantly 'consuming', but it's still very useful.
In fact, For a full two years I had a smartphone (Nexus) with no data plan, and it was still worth having. It functioned as my calendar, notepad, dictation device, and even maps (although it is less useful offline).
Besides the advantages others listed, I simply like the smaller size of it. It fits in my pocket without being annoying.
I also wear a wristwatch. Gosh, I'm old!
With a watch, I can read the time in 1/10 of a second, I don't have to dig it out of my pocket and turn it on, I can surreptitiously check the time, I can read it without my glasses on, I can read it out of the corner of my eye, it doesn't bounce around annoyingly in my pocket when I jog, it lasts a year on a charge, it works on an airplane, I can read it when my hands are full, I can check the time without taking my hands off the steering wheel, it works in the rain, etc.
The only thing I don't like about a watch is I have to remember to take it off when working with rotating machinery.
On the other hand a smartphone is expensive, you always risk breaking it/getting it stolen. Nobody will bother stealing my 20euros Samsung and if I get it gets destroyed I'll just buy a couple more. Oh and as TFA mentions the battery lasts for like 10 days of normal use.
The irony is that my job involves porting Android to embedded devices.
But of course at time goes buy the low end phones get more and more featureful. That being said I doubt the Moto G has 10 days battery life and is as solid as my current brick phone.
Still, it's a good recommendation, I'll look into it when my current phone stops working.
I do grimace more when I drop it onto a stone floor, but it has already survived that once.
In my case, I was mostly after navigation and good calendar sync, plus I was getting tired of T9 for countless texts.
However my primary telecommunications device is a cheap flip phone.
Most of the time I just, you know, use land lines at the places where I'm at.
If for some desperate reason, there's something that prevents me from tolerating a ~30 drive without in-situ communication, I mull over the idea of carrying a phone, and in the minutes it takes me to arrive at a decision, I usually just call the person I need to speak to, and square away the details on the spot.
Yeah, people have to try three or four numbers to get a hold of me sometimes, but like, that's their problem.
Almost there... :)
I already have mini hear attacks if I misplaced my phone because of all the data on it. My mails, my password manager etc. I really don't know if I would add my keys and my money to this. If lost, you literally are left with nothing.
It is also interesting to me that many of the folks in the article admit it's not a problem with smartphones, but rather their own shortcomings--they can't not be distracted.
It takes just one significant person in your life, who lives outside your range of unlimited-call phone plans, for this to be a serious argument in favour of using a smartphone.
[1] At the cost of a data plan which also takes care of internet needs.
(Edit: Grammar)
Most dumbphones sold now seem designed to urge owners toward smartphones. They're thick (an inch?!), the UX is stupid (staring at Verizon), syncing with anything is a hassle, and include other features as bullet points but barely useable.
They should be very thin (less than an iPhone 5), small as practical for holding, elegant attention-to-detail calling nuances, auto-sync with other devices where appropriate, and anything else it does should be limited and excellent. Voice dialing should be of high quality/accuracy. When on a call, should still show the time. There's a host of other nitpicky things that most phones suck at but are overlooked as the norm and no viable alternatives.
If I'm carrying around a tablet, why bother carrying a phone which is nothing more than the same thing shrunk? I'd rather a phone which is an excellent phone, and is aware of & connected with the other devices I'm around much of the day.
I do have an iPad which serves as a great middle ground, portable nearly full featured computing when I need it, but it's not quite so temptingly convenient to pull out and distract myself in the middle of a conversation or restaurant.
(Actually my phone is a fairly well provisioned feature phone, an AT&T Z431 with a browser and email and GPS and camera, but I don't have a data plan to use any of it. All I do is voice calls and text on AT&T's cheapo prepaid plan.)
[1]: http://www.nokia.com/in-en/phones/phone/nokia-1280/specifica...
The flashlight is handy too, major upgrade from my last dumb phone.
edit: also, I like the lack of SMS space - it decreases my reliance on the device. I write down the important stuff and purge the rest monthly. SMS is a rubbish format for keeping my brain in.
So now I can go for a walk/bike ride/drive and be off the grid for an hour or two, but I'm never far from a wifi network if I need it. I also save a lot of money each month.
To me, this is the best of both worlds.
Republic's upcoming Moto G (April availability) looks ideal for me as a basic smartphone.
Often they are the arty type who try to stand out from the crowd even though they have a nicely intellectual justification "I'm get too distracted, I lose out on quality of life". The cynic in me thinks they just want to be different.
If anything, it would be nice to own a smartphone so my friends and colleagues will stop acting weird about it.
Most of the "arty" types you see probably just can't afford one. As someone who over the years has lost their phone a couple times and dropped it many more times, no way am I going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a new one every time that happens.
I also don't own a smartphone because I already spend enough time at my computer, and doing all the same things on a tiny screen with no mouse/keyboard/etc. would feel like a massively downgraded experience.
For me, the only appealing features of a smart phone are tethering and GPS. I'm fine without them though. I moved to a new city ~6 months ago, and I already know my way around much better than most (especially useful because most of the city is not well documented on Google Maps / OpenStreetMap). Probably would not be the case if I had GPS everywhere.