Early August this year I switched to using a flip phone. I thought I wanted to get away from my smartphone and that whole shebang so I found a “dumbphone” online that still managed to run a light version of Android. I didn't want to go completely AWOL and figured I still needed some connection to the Internet, mostly in case I needed a Maps application or for other “in case of emergency” ideas. Exactly three months later I switched my phone line back to my iPhone and abandoned the flip phone entirely. Where did it all go wrong?
All of the reasons we hate our smartphones are tired at this point, but my main one was that I didn’t like how much time I was spending on TikTok. I don’t think I even really enjoy the app anymore, but I can’t stop making videos then spending the rest of my day checking if I passed 200 views. Using screentime apps didn’t work at all, I’d just click through to bypass. I’ve deleted TikTok multiple times, only to redownload it within 48 hours each time. I think the longest I’ve lasted is a week. It’s really a problem.
Tech minimalism seemed a healthy alternative. Removing the phone meant taking the need for self control away entirely, which maybe--in my head--would have led to some positive changes. Maybe I could read more. Maybe I could write more. Maybe I could fill out more job applications. The TLDR of this all is that none of that ended up happening, all for a few sneaky reasons I don’t think I could have anticipated before I started. Living without a smartphone isn’t impossible, but it does make a few things inconvenient. Admittedly, everything I’m about to write about is a privileged “first world problem”. Alas, a few major limitations in the flip phone I purchased meant that I still ended up carrying my smartphone with me everywhere I went, counteracting the entire intentions behind this experiment. Also, I don’t think most of those contrivances are unique to me--most people my age accustomed to smartphone use would likely have these similar challenges.
For context I started with an iPhone 11 Pro Max from 2020. In conventional smartphone years perhaps it’s “old” but it works amazingly still and I don’t have any issues with it. Nor do I plan to “upgrade” to a newer phone anytime as long as this one still works. In my head I thought if I kept my flip phone I’d stay with that and never buy another smartphone again, but I’ll tell you right now that won’t happen. I don’t love the iPhone, I prefer Android, but I wanted to try the Apple Ecosystem and now they have me trapped. I don’t plan to get another phone any time soon so I have no idea what my “next phone” will be. Screw their planned obsolescence, I’ll use this phone forever!
I switched to a Cat S22 Flip. Between reading the Dumbphones Subreddit and a number of YouTube reviews this phone seemed to have what I thought I was looking for. The phone runs Android, but the stripped down operating system Android Go designed for phones with less than 2 gigabytes of RAM. So it runs apps like Spotify and Google Maps, but doesn’t run anything more intensive. I never tried Instagram or TikTok so I don’t know if they work, but you definitely won't be playing any games. While the phone seems to retail for a bit more, I found a refurbished phone on eBay for fifty bucks and I really thought I was about to be in my economical bag.
The Cat S22 is a bit of a bulky phone, fitting heavy in both the hand and pocket. It's thick and a lot heavier than most phones you’ll find today, measuring almost an entire inch thick and weighing practically half a pound. For their part the rugged design is intentional, not a design limitation. The Cat (short for Caterpillar) that makes this phone is the same Cat(erpillar) that makes bulldozers and construction equipment. Presumably they made this phone with their own users in mind.
At 2.8” on a 480x640 display the screen is relatively abysmal for a smartphone but on par with what you would expect from a flip phone. Surprisingly the Cat S22 hosts a touchscreen, which will amaze all of your friends who haven’t seen a touch screen since the first Obama administration. The touchscreen allows for simple navigation on a number of apps, granted that they don't require heavy processing. Paradoxically, though, it's marginally too small for practical use on just about everything. By the time you get both the top menu and the bottom menu on the screen a height of 640 pixels doesn’t leave much room for actual content. But at the same time... that's kind of the point isn’t it? At least for my purposes. I wasn't getting the phone for heavy smartphone usage, so I surmised the intentional restrictions would limit my ability to go online. Unfortunately, the limitations made the phone just a little bit too restricted.
I had to change my phone plan for this switch. Fortunately I was able to keep my number, but my normal phone plan wouldn’t support the S22. After shopping around my options I picked a cheap Mint Mobile plan, a 3-month subscription of unlimited talk and text with a trial allowance of 20 GB of data $15 each month, meaning $45 up front. That still managed to average less than my usual plan, so once again I really thought I’d be minimalist both in tech and budget. If I’d continued the plan I’d either have to switch to 5 GB a month at the same price or upgrade for more data. I didn’t think it would matter either way, since according to my plan I’d only need this phone for the occasional Google Maps route. I figured I’d download all of my music streams offline and do the same for my audiobooks, so even at 5 GB of data per month I couldn’t see how I would use it all.
This does bring me to my first major hangup, but before going into that I’d like to talk about the Mint app for a second. Mint obviously designed the app for the roughly 9x16-ish vertical display of most phones so this will less be their fault and more a limitation of the small square-ish screen. With the app being designed for a portrait vertical display, not everything fit on the screen at one time, but the app also wasn’t designed to scroll. In literally the first thing I did with my new phone I struggled to activate my phone plan, only because the login and activation code boxes didn’t all fit on the display and it took me forever to try to scroll without tapping a button I didn’t mean to press. The small screen makes most apps more difficult to use, as even if the app does adapt to the size of the screen the buttons become much smaller than one would be accustomed to and fat fingers can cause accidental taps.
Back to that aforementioned at hangup, the only things I thought I’d be using this phone other than talk and text was offline music streaming, Maps, and maybe a hotspot if I really needed it. However, these three ended up being the exact reasons I switched back to my iPhone.
I didn't have great coverage with Mint, which I'm not sure is due to the phone or the plan. The plan would be the obvious answer, but I’ll explain. I would get dropped calls or bad reception even in different parts of my home or in different third places I frequented but honestly I thought it was because I live kind of on the outskirts of a major city. Conversely, though, I had even worse reception in the city, and one time when I spent the weekend at a friend’s home I went almost a whole day not getting a signal at all. Weirdly, though, I’m still going to put it on the phone, only because of an experience I had the day before my plan expired. At the time I wanted to drive to a local estate sale. I didn’t know where it was and planned to use the Google Maps app on the S22 to get there, but during my drive the GPS just completely lost signal. Since I placed all of my trust in the GPS to get me there and didn’t look at the steps before I left (because who actually does that) I had to pull over to a random gas station to find my bearings. I don’t know how, but the hotspot still worked on the phone despite me not seeming to have a GPS or data signal. By whatever grace I used the S22 hotspot to connect to the iPhone Google Maps app and the GPS worked perfectly on there, so, honestly, I don’t know what happened. But with the Maps app on the S22 already being barely legible because of the screen size, completely losing the signal was the last straw.
With the music streaming plan, that didn’t work at all, only because I didn’t check if the S22 had a headphone jack before I ordered it. I’m sure the reviews I read before said it did, but I was wrong. This was the first reason I still ended up carrying my iPhone with me everywhere, since my wired headphones I planned to use didn’t fit and my AirPods would not connect to the S22 Bluetooth. Blaming this less on the S22 and more on the Apple Ecosystem may be fair, but wherever the blame lay it didn’t work. I planned this experimental lifestyle change with a pseudo-tech minimalist and pseudo-anti consumerism dogma in mind, so I refused to buy any more headphones I didn’t need, but at the same time I intended the S22 to carry my music and audiobooks on the for the gym and in the car, etc. Well, that instantly ruined that plan. This meant that if I wanted to stream anything I still had to bring my iPhone with me, meaning I was still carrying both phones together and instantly defeating the purpose of the whole experiment. Already right out of the box I’d had two major frustrating transgressions dooming this project. Maybe a bit more research and a different phone could have countered this, but from where I started I don’t think I had any other way I could have known this.
Carrying double phones also led to a parable where, at least in my head, I thought that the iPhone not having service meant that other than my offline downloads it’d be relatively unusable and the erasing the need for self control issue would still be solved. Unfortunately, there’s still WiFi. And unfortunately, in most of the places I go regularly the phone had already been connected. And if it wasn’t connected before, it wasn’t that difficult to connect. Soooo, the self control thing is moot again. (There was actually an important reason why I did feel the need to connect, but I’ll get to that later.) Additionally, I always had my 20 GBs of hotspot to rely on, and since I wasn’t using the phone for anything else those 20 GBs went pretty far. When you’re connected to WiFi in your home and in all the places you regularly visit, the places you are actually disconnected and need data are far and few. I really only found myself without a WiFi signal when I walked on a trail in the woods near my home or if I wanted to stream (hands free!) while I was driving, but since both of those I could usually account for I generally had my offline downloads ready and didn’t need data anyway.
So, between the S22’s lack of a headphone jack and me using Wi-Fi and hotspot to have data at almost all times, I was practically still an iPhone guy except for one major inconvenience, and this inconvenience was really the major inconvenience that necessitated me both carrying both phones at all times and switching back as soon as my plan was over. Weirdly, I think it could have been fixed easily, but once I explain I’ll tell you why not-fixing was better no matter how inconvenient.
Even once I changed my number over to the Android phone my iPhone still received all of my text messages sent through iMessage and any phone calls made through FaceTime, which meant that if anyone sent me an iMessage instead of a text (which is probably 90% of my friends and family) it went to my iPhone and not the S22. This meant that once again, if I wanted to have the bare minimum of contact with the people in my life I had to either carry both phones together or risk missing out entirely. Sure some text messages aren’t immediate, but many are timely enough that you want to see them in a reasonable time frame. Admittedly, there probably is a way that I could’ve had all of my texts sent to the flip phone, but once I started actually texting on the phone, I realized that I may have been a bit overly sentimental about trying to text on one of those T9 keyboards. I think nostalgia made it seem like it be a lot nicer than it was, but I really didn't enjoy it. It took a long time to type, but also the screen being small I couldn't see all the messages without scrolling a lot. If I received a picture, there wasn't much to see. Also, the phone had a weird quirk where it didn't always alert me when I got a new text message. I would have to open the messaging app and once I did that I would get a barrage of notifications of all the texts I had not seen. Thus, logistically, I preferred the messages coming to the iPhone, not necessarily because of iMessage, but of the inconveniences involving flip phone texting.
So, the whole flip phone thing just didn't really work out. It had an idealism to it that I think could work if I were in a different place in life, but that just wasn't applicable for me in my current life situation. I would like to go back to a minimalist phone, but compared with the phone I used I need a little bit more practicality. A headphone jack or compatible headphones will be preferable, and technically an easy fix. I do need a marginally larger screen, probably something more rectangular so apps work as intended and so that I can actually see the maps if I'm trying to use it while I'm driving. The keyboard may just have to be something I accept. I’d need better service, something much more reliable, a service that in an actual emergency situation wouldn't leave me stranded. And I'd have to figure out the texting thing because I'm a texter and the majority of my conversations happen over text.
One alternative you may suggest in your head right now could be phones like the Samsung Z Flip or the new Motorola Razrs, but those phones would not work for this experiment. Those phones are still fully functional smartphones, and this was less about the flipping form factor and more about a digital minimalism. It’d effectively be the same as carrying the iPhone, just on a different OS. Phones like the Z Flip or new Razrs do solve some of the functionality issues with the S22 like screen size and keyboard typing, but offer the same software experience that I’m trying to get away from. I don’t know if they have headphone jacks, but surely most other headphones with them. Ideally I would like a phone with more functionality than the S22, but less functionality than the iPhone, and if it flips is inconsequential.