Comment by lolsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolsal | Hacker News Reader

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> Do you even need instant communication in that case? It's not like you're going to have a quick unexpected meetup or some "hey I'm quite busy can you go get the kids?" Not to mention time zone issues.

"help, I'm being detained in Paris!" "I was mugged and need a passport!" "My plane was late so I missed my connecting flight, so I am spending another night in Berlin."

etc.

>People didn't die of boredom before. Read a book, magazine, work on something on your laptop if you must. Also people seem to lose the ability to just take a short timeout from everything, just to think about your life for a bit, remember some good old times with friends or family you might have lost, and so on.

I actually agree with you totally here, but a counterpoint would be that I can get mundane stuff done while doing mundane stuff (riding a bus, taxi, etc.) so that when I get home I get more family time instead of "not now, I have to see why Comcast/Verizon/Etc. screwed up our bill again."

> "help, I'm being detained in Paris!" "I was mugged and need a passport!"

And they conveniently let you keep your 1000$ iPhone ;). But these are all situations where I could just make a regular call with my dumb phone as well. Sure roaming costs will kick in, but that's even worse for data. My current provider charges 2€/min for calls outside the EU and 1€ per 50kb (yes that's not a typo). In all seriousness though, sure, there's always situations where having a smartphone is beneficial, I won't deny that. Especially working in tech it might even be that suddenly shit hits the fan at your company and you'd desperately take a wonky ssh connection on a bus ride since every seconds counts.

And if you really have that level of self control, as the OP of this discussion suggests, that you won't distract yourself more than you actually benefit than that's fine. I found myself barely managing to do that and switched to a dumb phone again in 2015ish. On trains and buses I'd mindlessly skim through HN or reddit or random tech sites, I eventually configured my work mail on my phone since sometimes it's more convenient, but then found myself reading mails in the evening during family time etc. Most colleagues confirm that they have similar patterns, but they're almost all single or childless so they probably don't care that much.

I still use it occasionally on the go and frequently at home as a laptop replacement when I'm just about to catch up on the news or post on HN. But I pretty much wiped all apps except the browser. I could not manage to do that when I used it as my main phone for almost 2 years.

You can buy a cheap prepaid sim, and save yourself from data roaming tariffs. And it is the moment when smartphones shine - you'll have the same IDs/handles/usernames in messengers. With a feature phone your identity (your number) will change.

True, unfortunately depending on country it can be quite involved to buy a sim card. Here in Germany a year ago they changed it so it's required the seller validates your identity. Since this is a somewhat involved process pretty much all discount brands chose not to do this in the store but require postal or video ident, the latter being the only viable option if you only stay a week or two, but you need to find some place to make that video call in the first place, have all the documents at hand, hope the call center worker speaks some English which is less likely the cheaper the provider... I observed the same in China. 8 years ago I could walk into some tiny store in an alley, point at a sim card without knowing what I'm doing and after some back and forth with mostly gestures and writing down numbers I was all set. Last year they required my passport and proof that I stay at a hotel that registered me with the local police station. I couldn't possibly manage that without the help from a local.

Since this drifted somewhat away from the original topic let me add that I'm quite curious about KaiOS devices as it seems it might offer a suiting compromise for my needs. It got most popular messenger apps so I could take advantage of improved connectivity with people but the experience is still limited enough to prevent information overload and playing around with it too much. The selection of devices is just too limited at the moment.

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