As everybody, I have a smart phone. But half of the last year, I was using a "not so smart" phone on daily basis. And I was surprised, but I kinda liked it. What was my experience? What unique features did it offer? Was there anything that I was missing? And how does it compare to the life with a smart phone.
I actually had a smart phone as my main phone for quite some time. My first smart phone was Palm Centro probably sometime around 2008. Even before that I had various Palm PDAs and phones with either infrared port or Bluetooth. Back then, combining PDA and Phone made a lot of sense. You got a really cool features. Like silent mode when there was an event in your calendar. MP3 ringtones and different ringtones for different groups of people. And limitless storage for SMS. Internet connectivity was much more stable and having full QWERTY keyboard in your pocket really helped.
But even back there, there were occasionally some issues. Palm OS back then sometimes became unstable and phone restarted by itself. It was inconvenient if your SIM was set to require PIN, you didn’t noticed it restarted and ended up being offline an unreachable for hours. But otherwise, it started really fast so it wasn’t that much of an issue.
Now more than a decade later, the downsides became more prominent and upsides less relevant. Almost none of the phones have a hardware keyboard nowadays. You have to type on display and either trust autocorrect or fix many typos. Phones rarely restart themselves. More commonly they become unresponsive. Because they have other important thing to do than let you click on the display to answer the call. Like showing you ads. If you realize that you would wait forever to be able to call back and forcibly reboot your phone, it will take minutes to boot up again. And once it does, it will be unusable for another long period of time, because all your apps are starting for some reason and trying to figure out what is going on and what advertisements to display to you. And some of those applications starts to scan your storage for any changes and try to reindex all your files making your phone unresponsive for even longer.
Those things can be partially mitigated, if you keep number of apps at minimum and if you have a phone with plenty of RAM. More RAM that my home computer, that is still very usable, just to answer a call. And also what is the point of a smart phone if you can’t have an app for every single thing you do. How would you know how many times you wiped your nose yesterday and what your friend blogged about without specialized apps. Not to mention going to a shop without their loyalty app.
So after having various smart phones for almost two decades, how did I ended up with a dumb phone? Actually, the main reason is that my smart phone fell on the ground and have some issue with a microphone. So every time I wanted to make or answer the call, I had to use hands-free or headphones. That was quite inconvenient. But it was even worse. I have both connected via Bluetooth. So let’s take my previous rant about being unable to answer a call, because some of your applications decides that it is now more important to do something else and combine it with hope that your phone and your headphones (that you have to find somewhere) will connect in time for you to answer the call. I suffered for a while and then gave up. My father had an old phone he was no longer using, so I decided to give it a try.
And I was amazed. How snappy the UI felt. It had no distracting extra applications. It could answer the calls all the time. It was lightweight and small. So it didn’t bothered me even during long calls. Sounds was clear and loud. And on top of that, this particular phone is actually quite flashy/cool as well.
I ended up with having old smartphone to do my "smart tasks" like e-mails, web browsing, watching movies and similar. And with simpler phone for actual calls. And it was working well for me! There were some downsides, but the upsides almost made up for them.
Obvious downside was having to carry around two devices. But only device that I had to be reachable quickly to answer the call was the smaller and lighter phone. Smartphone could stay in another pocket/bag. And sometimes, I needed to be reachable, but didn’t need the Internet access, so I went out with just the smaller phone.
Real downside was a battery life. As I had only one SIM card with a data plan, I had to share Internet connectivity to my smart phone over the Wi-Fi. And although battery life on my smaller phone wasn’t bad by itself, with hotspot enabled, I was able to drain it in half a day. And it didn’t supported any kind of quick charge.
Feature that I missed was integration with my calendar. I have my smartphone set in a way that whenever I have a meeting, it automatically turns on silent mode. Luckily, without smart apps, the only things I had to worry about were calls and SMS and those are actually much rarer than IM and other "smart" apps notifications. So I was able to live without it. On the other hand, when I was on call with someone and had a need to schedule a next meeting, it was great to open up the calendar on my smart phone without interrupting the call.
Speaking about integration, another cool feature that smart phones offer is contact synchronization. Unfortunately, my not so smart phone didn’t support CardDAV. My workaround was sending all contacts from my smart phone over Bluetooth. My contact list doesn’t change that often, so mass import worked for me and eventually I would have deleted all contacts and did mass import once again.
As I didn’t have anything important in the phone, I didn’t need to protect it that much. I just turned it on and could start calling people. With press (actually a hold) of a button. Regardless whether I was wearing gloves (so unable to use fingerprint reader and touchscreen) or helmet (not being able to use face recognition). Very convenient when opening garage doors via cell phone on a motorcycle. And as I mentioned, the call quality was much better than with my smart phone. Might be difference between those two particular models, but in general, I do expect that as calling is the primary function, the focus during the phone development will be there and not on the camera, color representations or whatever.
How was my experience? Am I staying with two phones? Currently not, I’m already back to a new smartphone. Main reason? Actually the simplest one to fix. I have data plan and calls on the same SIM card. If I got a separate SIM cards for calls only and data only, it would make sense to stick with two phones. The other downsides, like automatic silent mode could be fixed by tighter integration. I could have written an app that would control sound settings on the call phone from the smart phone. It didn’t bother me that much during my time with two phones, but I had something half written back in 2007 before getting my first smartphone.
In the end, I’m glad that I gave it a try. It opens up some possibilities for the future. In future I might get a dumb cool looking phone again just for calls and smart handheld with data plan, that doesn’t necessarily have to be able to make calls and would run something more interesting/usable like PostmarketOS or even openSUSE.