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Not a smartphone, not a dumbphone, just a slowphone.

I’m at a bar, a waiting room, or on a train. There’s a soft chime, a jingle, I reach into my pocket. ‘Sure, yeah, see you soon’. I snap the phone shut. Everyone around me is frozen, they’re all thinking the same thing. What was that? Was that a dumbphone? One of them bravely shuffles forwards, asks about it. ‘Oh this? It’s just a flip phone, I’m not very on my phone you see’. This sends a seismic shock around the room/carriage. Multiple people take a long hard look at themselves, their 4-5 hour screen times, they’re imagining different lives, they’re picturing all the activities they could get up to, all the great literature they could be reading, all the amazing everyday slices of life they’re missing out on by not being present. But it’s all ok, I have shown them the way, they will go home, they will dump their iPhones in the bin, they will be free, just like me.

There was a time where I thought this was an actual dream scenario, minus the other people obviously, I’m out, I get a call, I answer, I put the phone back. That’s basically the dumbphone dream. Your phone is a phone, when someone needs to get in touch you can reply, apart from that you don’t think about it, it is a simple tool. Unfortunately, this just isn’t viable for a lot of people - for a lot of reasons. For me, its because I need a banking app, I have a stupid authentication app I need for work, everyone I know and love uses WhatsApp, and most embarrassingly of all, my sense of direction means that when I go out running for longer than an hour or so, there is a non-zero chance I may get lost and never return.

I trawled the web endlessly for my holy grail. I lurked the subreddits; I watched a thousand slickly produced video reviews. I looked at light phones, minimal phones, modded blackberrys, punkts, muditas and a million other devices that promised to make you a better person just by clicking buy. Maybe it was fatigue, maybe it was boredom, but none of them really resonated with me. I decided to dumb down my phone, I wrote about it earlier in this blog, and that did work, but I still heard the siren’s call when I was hungover or particularly stressed, it was easy to fall back on old habits, and just scroll away. Much like most social media shouldn’t really be called ‘social media’ nowadays when it’s a series of short form videos playing endlessly, your phone doesn’t resemble a phone anymore, it’s a black hole.

In the end, I stumbled across the Unihertz Titan 2 Elite, horrific name aside, I thought it looked cute. I never owned a blackberry, and have no experience with keyboard phones of any sort. Now that I think about it, I bought it out of fatigue. There’s so much choice out there, I knew I just wanted something that would work, and didn’t look like a regular phone and this happened to appear at the right time. I’ve had it for a few weeks now, and I love it. I love the way it’s out of sight out of mind, multiple times over the last week I’ve placed it down in the evening and forgot about it until the next day. I’ve woken up and the battery is still absolutely fine, ready to be used for another day. The keyboard satisfies the nerdy part of me that likes to occasionally type away, I can add keyboard shortcuts so I can zip from app to app without touching the screen, I can message someone and it feels like I’m hacking into the pentagon.

It’s fun. The square screen is a godsend for avoiding any sort of slop online. Short form video just doesn’t work on it. When you watch a vertical video, it just crops the top part off, so you get headless figures speaking to you, and no idea what the hell is going on - it’s perfect. There’s a way to fix that, I think you can shrink the entire app down, but I haven’t looked up how, there’s no need. The keyboard also has this thing where you can scroll by swiping on it, man I have no idea how this works, but it is very handy. Here’s a little gif I made of this in action.

scroll

I thought about my strange phone today while reading this article. In particular this quote ‘Such trade-offs can be a small price to pay for maintaining a sense of control over one’s digital presence.’ This is not a new idea. Making something slightly difficult makes you less likely to do it. The unihertz is great for this. There is just enough friction when accomplishing everyday tasks, the keyboard is not as fast as a regular phone, websites require more scrolling, video just doesn’t really work, and beyond maps and music, a lot of apps just look weird on a square screen. For me this is the perfect amount of friction, when I look at my phone - I see a phone, then I get on with whatever else I want to be doing.

-P

Ephemera