About seven weeks ago, Nathaniel and I bought Nokia 2780 flip phones. We made the switch because we both dislike being attached to our smartphones and wanted to see how big of a change it was to switch. Here’s what I’ve learned.
The contacts were difficult to switch over manually because of the way the Nokia formats phone numbers, so I ended up needing to edit a large number of contacts even after importing them from my iPhone. That was annoying. The second annoying thing was that texting is significantly slower with a dumb phone, and I quickly made the change to calling someone whenever I had more to say than I could get across reasonably via text.
So far, luckily, no one seems to mind being called.
Two other things that I used to access daily on my phone, email for school correspondence and Discord for team project communication, suddenly became things I could only use my computer for. However, since I am actively on my computer every day, this ended up not being a big deal.
I immediately noticed the difference in my day when I didn’t have a smart phone at school. The temptation to pull my phone out and look at it randomly became way lower, and my anxiety (raised from checking my phone) also lowered.
The Nokia comes with T9 typing or predictive typing, which is like autocorrect but for a keypad. It suggests the word you are typing without the need to manually select every letter with multiple key presses. It’s very useful, and makes texting a bit faster once I figured out how to use it.
Calling people is also a benefit, because it’s great to hear people’s voices and is actually a more effective way to communicate. In summary, the benefits are more ease of mind, predictive typing, and being forced to call people.
After seven weeks, here are my current thoughts:
The camera quality is bad. There are times when I want to take a picture and show someone that picture, and what I’ve been doing is using my husband’s camera. The convenient camera on an iPhone is definitely something I miss and will have to get used to not having moving forward.
There have been occasions when being able to quickly check Discord while walking somewhere would have been convenient, but pulling out my computer to check is not.
Texting is still slow, but I’m getting used to it. I also generally say less over text at this point anyways, since I’m usually making plans with friends to actually see them.
One thing that I have found rather interesting is that texting on my Nokia absorbs almost all of my attention, meaning that I almost can’t text and talk to someone at the same time. This realization made me subsequently realize that previously, I was texting and talking to someone in real life at the same time on a regular basis.
I forget I even have a phone most of the time, because it just lives in the pocket of my coat and the only reason I need it at home is because of George Fox’s two factor authentication system. It’s honestly been a huge relief to not have my phone on me at all times, and have one less thing I can get sucked into or distracted by.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend this to everyone. There are some great use cases for smartphones out there like video calling and taking good quality pictures and videos. However, this has been a really fun thing to do for me and something I will probably continue to do as part of my journey away from being addicted to technology.