# phones: thoughts about phones now that i have to buy a new one

this year (2021) swisscom decided to shut down its 2g network. i got no warning about this, my phone just suddenly stopped working. it took me quite a while to guess that 2g might be gone and then confirming in the news that it's indeed very likely. apparently i might have been the only person in switzerland who still used 2g phones. to be fair, this is a corporate subscription so maybe my workplace got a warning about this via snail mail. it would have been nice to give a few days headsup via sms too though.

i've switched to a dumbphone in 2015 after 1.5 years of using a smartphone. i got my first smartphone (nexus4) from my workplace in 2013. but it was quite addictive for me, i was checking it way too often rather than being present in the world. the constant updates were also super annoying. almost as if every month there is some big os update that takes ages to install and then it changes the user interface subtly enough so that you can throw out some of your muscle memory all the time. but what really pissed me up is that they break very quickly and you are then expected to get a new phone. after a year or so it started occassionally rebooting. it even rebooted at night. back then i had to have mandatory encryption due to corp policy and you would need to enter your unlock pattern to boot. this meant that on some nights it decided to reboot then the next morning i got no alarm or page notifications at all until i woke up naturally. and i was pretty sure this was a software problem only present with wifi on, but on support all i got that the phone is end of life, i should get a new one. i really hate this planned obsolescence attitude so i decided to get rid of smartphones from my life.

i had the first generation nokia 105 from 2013 that i bought in 2015. it had none of the issues that i had with the smartphone. i also felt that i got generally calmer. this nokia aged quite well. it still functioned well although the letters/numbers from its keypad completely faded away. i could type blind on this so this wasn't bothering me that much. separate buttons would have been nice though. later models had keypads like that. anyways, i wanted a similar phone that would work with the new networks.

in the meantime i dusted off the new corporate pixel 4 that i got from the company last year when i moved to switzerland. i only got it because i thought i'll need it for work (a special app) but then it turned out i don't so i didn't use it and couldn't be bothered to return it. i've put in the sim card and it worked fine.

i've spent some time on this android to make it somewhat usable. this entails removing all the unnecessary apps, turning off unnecessary features (animations: what's the point of this?), and other tweaks. i've disabled data and wifi, enabled battery saver. basically i've managed to turn it into a dumbphone.

the nice thing about the old nokia that its battery lasted for weeks. i thought all these fancy new phones can't last a day even. i was quite surprised to learn that the pixel4 with the latest android could probably last for a week even. it drained only about 12-15% battery per day.

my phone usage other than to check the time is very light: i only use it to set alarms for wakeup and for meeting reminders, and some evenings i use its flashlight to see in the dark rather than lamps because i don't want to accidentally wake my kid with the extra light. secondary reason is to receive pages when i'm oncall at work. and on very rare occasions i also use the sms and calling features.

i'd wager that 99% of the time my phone is on standby. it would be nice if i didn't need to mess around with chargers every day. after learning the pixel4 can probably survive a week i even considered just staying with it.

but there were a few things bothering me.

its size was much bigger than my old nokia. it didn't fit as nicely into my pocket. it felt quite bulky.

i missed the good old buttons. there were mornings when i was trying to disable the morning alarm via swiping and my swipes just didn't register. and the alarm just got louder and louder (note: i'm not living alone). that was frustrating, let's say to the least. in retrospect i learned that i could have probably used the side buttons for this.

i do appreciate that a touchscreen is more generic interface, but i prefer buttons. i find them more reliable. it happens often on various screens that my finger doesn't register, especially when i'm in a less than ideal conditions. i might use the phone rarely but when i use it, i really need it to work. i prefer reliability over "usefulness". in other words, i wish for a keypad.

the fact that pixel4 is a smartphone also bothered me for several reasons.

although i deleted all the apps from it, it would be very trivial for me to reenable data and start browsing crap when i feel uncomfortable at some place. sure, i could probably resist this for quite a while since i didn't associate internet with my phone for 6 years but i'm sure it would all come back over time. i'd very quickly adapt to it and then couldn't live without it (e.g. to live without gps). and i'm also sure that if i'd start using this more heavily then it would start having problems like i had with the nexus4 (even if it's just the annoying updates in case the hardware remains good). i can safe myself a lot of mental health if i completely cut myself from this addiction device.

also, if it's a smartphone device and if others see it, i feel that they will have different expectations from you. they might expect that you are on whatsapp, messenger, viber, snapchat or whatever today's messenger apps are. while if all you have is a dumbphone, they'll consider you as a weirdo and won't have much expectations from you. it's a good conversation starter too if you are hipster enough to flash it now and then in front of others.

besides, one needs to show a good example for the next generation: that one doesn't need a smartphone to survive in society. maybe this way i can somewhat delay my kid's smartphone addiction.

anyways, long story short: i still wanted an old fashioned dumbphone. easy peasey, i say to myself: let's check out nokia's newest models.

the newest nokia 105 (2019) can't do 3g or 4g. but nokia 225 4g can! it even has a camera. i don't really need a camera but at least that is not that addictive so that doesn't bother me too much. i almost bought this on the spot but then i noticed one little detail as i was comparing its specs with my old phone: the size.

here are the sizes of these 3 phones for reference:

the new phone i've looked up is much much bigger! this must be some weird model then, i thought. but all the other phones grew too, even the new nokia 105 models:

or compare my wife's very old dumbphone from her teenager times with a new model of the same number:

i recall from my childhood that the adults complained about the phones getting way too small. looks like in 2021 you can't get small phones anymore that are 3g/4g.

after researching a lot on the internet, i've found pretty much only these phones with comparable size of my old phone:

maybe there are more but these are the ones i found. all of these phones support at least 3g and you can message too. (i've seen some phones which can only do calls but i ignored those.)

oh, and based on the specs and the reviews, none of these phones can last for a week. which is odd because nokia claims to work for 28 days in 3g mode, 20 in 4g, yet 4 days is the longest duration i found in the customer reviews. but it runs kaios so i guess that's a huge battery drain at this point. i'm sad that battery duration also became a lost art over time.

let me immediately eliminate the jelly pro: it's a full smartphone and it comes with all the downsides. besides, for some reason you can't easily update past android 8, so it probably has worse battery management. the reviews say it works for about a day. (iirc battery management gets better with android versions. i guess developers are slowly learning that not running the apps constantly makes the battery last longer. probably the newer android builds have longer sleep cycles.)

at this point i pretty much gave up on the battery front and resolved to charging my phone every day. so i decided battery shouldn't be deciding factor for me.

at first i was eyeballing the light phone. it's an e-ink android phone that has a hardcoded dumbphone app running on it. technically you can get to the underlying full android phone, but it's a bit of a challenge and defeats the purpose of the phone anyways. it has no flashlight and no buttons. it's quite expensive too ($350). and you'd need to wait several months before they get another batch to ship. with all this together it was easy for me to say no to this phone too.

i was then eyeing for that zanco phone. there were a few things bothering me about it: it might be too small and i'm not sure about the quality: in some video reviews i've seen the reviewer struggling to press some buttons. and i'd have to order it from china which means it would take ages to arrive and i'd need to pay import taxes too. oh and it doesn't have a flashlight.

and then there's that nokia 2720 flipphone. it no longer uses nokia's standard dumbphone os but rather kaios. kaios, iiuc, is like android but for phones with buttons. it's a fork of mozilla's defunct firefox os. basically the whole os is just a webbrowser running in a linux and all the apps are just html5 pages. this totally makes sense to me but the battery time worries me because i don't really associate the web with efficiency. and since it's all web based maybe it could run the addictive apps too. but otherwise it does check okay on other dimensions: has flashlight and buttons, doesn't look like a smartphone, i can call and message with it. it can even act as a wifi hotspot to share the mobile internet, which i'm not sure is good or not, since then i can easily use a secondary device to browse internet anywhere. but it's a bit too big for my taste: bigger than my old nokia 105 even when closed. i couldn't find a smaller phone though, so i can't be very picky.

btw, if the size didn't bother me that much, i'd have probably gone with energizer e241s. it's also a kaios phone but the reviewers were happy with the battery life and pretty much was the cheapest at the time (40 chf). for reference the nokia2720 was 82 chf and the zanco $62 + shipping.

after contemplating a lot over my choices, i realized that i can't make a good decision here. all choices have some downsides. i just need to pick one and go with it.

my wife suggested that i go with the nokia 2720, it'll be less hassle. so i went with that. i'll soon post a review of it. you can look at @/phones.jpg to see how it compares to my other phones in terms of size and bulkiness.

published on 2021-02-20

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