The Allure and Weakness of Feature Phones

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You may look at a feature phone, or dumb phone, depending on your sense of humour as a fantastic trip back into the past where phones are used for calling people and texting. Whilst this reality may seem enthralling the reality is quite different. A feature phone is old fashioned today.

Modern Mobile Telephony

Modern Mobile telephony is about messaging apps such as Signal, Whatsapp and others. If you use a feature phone you may lose your access to both of these instant messaging platforms. In so doing you vanish from the world of the connected. The other drawback is that if you wear a Garmin, or an Apple watch, or an Android watch, or a Xiaomi or other device you’re disconnected again, but this time from the quantified self. These devices require you to be connected via your phone to be most useful.

Photography

Plenty of us walk with our phones, and leave photo cameras and video cameras at home, so by switching to a feature phone we lose the ability to capture interesting sights and sounds during a walk. This means that we must get into the habit of carrying a photo or video camera once again, and once we are home downloading the images to our home computer.

Komoot, AllTrails, and Strava, among others can provide us with good navigation without having to buy a new map for every new place we choose to hike. With SwitzerlandMobility we can look at topographical maps while we are walking, to decide whether to take the left fork or the right one, as well as to determine what something nearby is.

Audiobooks and Podcasts

It’s easy for us to take for granted that the podcasts and audiobooks we listen to are synched between devices permanently and that if we leave the smartphone at home, we lose access to the latest podcasts and audiobook progress. It’s easy for younger people to think “I don’t want to use a smart phone, I’d be happier with a dumb phone. The point is that smartphones simplified our lives rather than encumbered them.

Payment and Information

Payments are not possible with feature phones so you will need to use cards, cash or other forms of payment when you leave the smart phone at home. You also lose access to instant information. With feature phones the browser is slow and underpowered. Twitter, and other social sights are barely usable, if at all. Other websites have been designed to run very well on high powered computers, but grind to a halt on lower spec machines. A feature phone is not fun to use when browsing the web.

And Finally

I know this because I bought two or three dumb phones to play with, and as I experimented I met the same issues with three different devices. If you had Signal, a podcast app, an audiobook app and a better camera a feature phone could be relevant. The problem with dumb phones, now, is that they completely ignore that we use Signal, Whatsapp and other apps, rather than the phone as a phone and SMS. You might save hundreds of francs by buying a feature phone but you will need a GPS device, a podcast/audiobook player and a camera. It is cheaper and more convenient to get a smart phone.

My interest in feature phones is related to cost, and size. If a smaller, cheaper phone was convenient, then it would free me from the boring smartphone form factor that is so popular at the moment.