Comment by allenrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by allenrb | Hacker News Reader

It's been about a month since I pulled the SIM from my iPhone, snipped it in half, sync'd the latest photos (mostly my daughter, or cats), ran a factory reset, and stuck it on a shelf. I bought an LG flip phone the next morning.

Since then, I've felt like parts of my brain are growing back. While I'd cut down significantly on smartphone usage over the prior year, I'd started to realize that the mere act of exercising "don't use it" discipline was in itself distracting. That's all gone now. My flip phone is not fun. It's boring. In fact, it's immensely frustrating when I do need to carry on a texting conversation. And that's perfectly alright.

When I need to get someplace new, there's no Maps to save the day. Instead I look at the route beforehand and write (by hand, with a pen) a few notes on a Post-It. In the process, I've learned more about parts of two cities than I had in a year or more of mindless reliance on Maps.

The biggest thing I miss and haven't found a satisfying workaround for is the camera. Flip phones seem to be stuck in about 2001, camera-wise. Even under the best of conditions, the results are barely passable. It's my patient hope that if enough people reject smartphones, there may one day be higher end functionality available in a flip.

Do you drive rather than use public transport?

When I've headed out somewhere new with friends and ended up in a strange place at 1am, Google Maps public transit directions are my lifeline. If I drove I could just head in the rough direction or use a streetmap, though transit maps aren't usually complete with all routes and times. There is nothing worse than standing at a bus stop for an hour hoping a bus will come, and that bus will take you home. Train stations are alright if the trains are still running, but usually I need to rely on a late night, barely functioning bus network.

I would love an e-paper/ink phone that did maps, texts, calls, photos and nothing else.

I did the whole flip phone thing for awhile and you can load a version of google maps onto most phones that run Java applets.

Also, I worked on an epaper feature phone startup. But as a company we never got it to take off. I open sourced it to an extent but havent worked on it as much as I would have hoped. http://woodstead.org/epaper.html

Something like the Light Phone 2?

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/1/17066494/li...

This is also the killer feature of a smartphone for me as well. As someone who exclusively uses public transport, I feel my life would be so much harder without the route planning feature of Google maps. Just activate Google assistant, "Bus route to X arrive by Y". It can plan a route with connections that are from different public transport departments, so it is not a trivial amount of work to do manually.

I've already taken some of the steps outlined in this article to normalize my smartphone use. I might be biased because I have fought other difficult addictions like smoking, but smartphone addiction does not seem especially difficult to manage to me. The crucial step is realizing it's existence because it's so ubiquitous it seems normal and benign.

Pretty much my experience. Been like this on and off though. On a dumb phone for about a year, then got a smart phone for a year, realized it's a distraction, back to the dumb phone. And yes, the only dissatisfaction is not having a camera with me all the time. So what I ended up doing is actually carrying the smart phone (with very few apps and no SIM card) around whenever I think like I might want a camera. Sure, it's harder with 2 phones than with one, but it's still lighter than phone + camera. This seems to work best. I sometimes still check instagram when I'm on wifi, or listen to music, but really not much else. The addiction seems to be gone when I decide that the phone is really just a camera that also lets you post to IG when you have a nice picture and you're on wifi.

> I bought an LG flip phone the next morning.

Why did you get a new phone though? If it's not a smartphone can you only do phone calls and SMS on it? Do many people use phone calls or SMS any more? You may as well just not carry anything.

Yes, of course many people still use phone calls and SMS.

You can also email via SMS if you so desire, both sending and receiving works, although finding out your SMS email address usually involves sending yourself an email from the phone first.

Have you considered carrying a compact, dedicated digital camera, like the Cyber-shot WX220?

You should grab a high quality compact camera - something like a Sony RX100.

Me? Is that you? Did you write this in your sleep?

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