After about 10 minutes of frantically tapping tiny buttons to type out an unfinished text, my anger towards the “retro” Nokia 3210 I’m working on is mounting.
It’s one of a new wave of “detox” or “dumb” phones aimed at tech-stressed individuals who want to escape the bondage of apps and notifications but, right now, I really want to smash it.
The text is for my friend. The worst part is that I’m accompanying a group of students on a field trip to the London Docklands Museum, so I’ve been trying not to look at my phone at all.
Now the 11-year-olds with me are wondering two things: why is this woman so bad at texting, and why is her phone such a piece of junk?
I consider giving up because it’s getting embarrassing and the matter is only semi-urgent, but I persevere to the end of what reads like an SOS.
More and more people, especially Gen Z and millennials, are switching to brick phones like this 2000s favorite, which has been reissued due to mental health issues raised by smartphones and social media use.
If I were to start my first semester as a boarder at Eton in September, I would say goodbye to my iPhone 12 and my parents. New pupils are being banned from bringing smartphones in favour of bricks, and other schools are urging parents to buy low-tech devices.
So for the first time in over a decade, I don’t have access to my work email and can barely access the Internet when I’m traveling.
Unfortunately, if you’re interested in news, this is a bad day to tune out. People are still trying to come to terms with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and England’s defeat in the Euro 2024 final.
I haven’t figured out how to turn on predictive text, so texting, at least for now, is out of the question.
While there are many good reasons to keep smartphones away from children, I soon discover that trying to disengage as an adult is both liberating and a huge pain, because technology has so invaded everyday life.
When was the last time you looked at a pocket diary or a train timetable, or carried a pocket book and a map? Same with a weekly train ticket and a wallet full of bank and loyalty cards. I already had all of these when I moved to London more than 20 years ago and was playing Snake on the original Nokia 3210, which came out in 1999.
Now I do all of these things with apps, plus read the news, send emails, shop, and check the weather, and I don’t even like technology.
The (long) list of other things that smartphones have devoured, Pac-Man style, since I last used a phone like this includes bank branches, ticket offices, cameras and the sat nav. If you’re going to divorce yourself from your digital life, it’s something that takes some effort.
On the first morning of my smartphone-free week, commuters, protected by their earphones, swiped their phones and smartwatches through the train station as I looked on wistfully, pulling out an increasingly forgotten bank card.
There was no “greet and checkout” for my morning Americano, either, and I soon realized I had nothing to read. There would be no headlines to scan, no X’ing or filtering emails. There would also be no silly Instagram content about how to dress, do makeup, or DIY.
The experiment had started badly the night before. After half an hour of fumbling with the phone, my husband turned to me and said, “I hate this phone already.” This was mainly because I hadn’t managed to turn off the “boing” sound that accompanied every keystroke. Old-school phones have a lot of menus.
He announcements of this Nokia rebootNow made by Finland’s HMD, it features a model made up like a Friends-era Jennifer Aniston. The ad for what is billed as a “detox phone” promises: “If it’s important, they’ll call or text” and says: “Throw back to Y2K, when conversations mattered more than likes and shares.” Good thing, because surfing the web with it brings back memories of dial-up broadband.
“Burn-in” phones are popular with festival-goers who fear losing their high-end devices, so they come with a few modern conveniences, such as 4G, Bluetooth and a camera. You can take selfies and videos, although the pictures reminded me of The Blair Witch Project.
Obviously, for many people, going without a smartphone is not an option. There are 2.4 million households in the UK that cannot afford a mobile phone contract at a time when essential services such as healthcare and welfare benefits are moving online. Parking is now a mess of apps and QR codes, but luckily there was still a phone number to call in my area.
During the week, many things had to wait until I was in front of my computer, including checking my bank account and credit card statement. And as far as my Back to the Future phone was concerned, online shopping hadn’t been invented yet. (My watch did, however, continue to count my steps.)
With my Clubcard in digital limbo, I also found myself hanging around Tesco checkouts on several occasions trying to get someone to “scan” it for me so I could pay the not-stupid loyalty prices.
Plus, not everyone will have noticed that you’re offline. Sure, you’re less likely to get scammed, but life will go on on Signal and WhatsApp and you’ll soon find yourself at the school gates asking, “What do you mean it’s a holiday?”
However, one thing you can’t fault dumb or feature phones for is price. They’re more durable and have spectacular battery life. This model costs £75, while the latest version of the iPhone starts at £800.
Toward the end of the pandemic, I got a wake-up call about my screen use. My memory seemed to be failing. The diagnosis was painful: I had stopped listening and was too busy staring at my phone.
By the end of the week, I was starting to like, or rather, no longer hate, the dumb phone. I had activated predictive text and the gap that emojis had previously left in my life was filled when, hahaha, I remembered “text language” and discovered the emoticon menu.
And, lest we forget, there’s Snake, a game that’s billed as the height of “newstalgia,” though I’ll take X any day with its jokes, memes, and crazy discussions about the Windsor Agreement. I now realize that romanticizing old technology is a bit like watching Life on Mars and feeling nostalgic for 1970s police. I’ll never do it again.
A brick phone makes you less obsessed with your phone, but it seems more suited to people who don’t want anyone to contact them or who are on holiday, rather than someone who has a job and kids. It’s much easier to silence the powerful computer in your pocket than to put the digital genie back in the bottle.