My first three months with a Nokia dumb phone as a daily driver

I switched from an iPhone to Nokia 515 two years ago and vowed never to go back. If I wrote a blog post like this it would probably just be, &quot;Living smartphone-free in the 2020&#x27;s is like having a superpower, it&#x27;s utter joy and freedom and and everyone still with a smartphone is a total sucker.&quot;<p>Then a couple of weeks ago I felt the social pressure and lack of a good camera so I bought an iPhone 12 mini. It was awful. I returned it 48 hours later and am now back with my beloved Nokia.<p>The grass really is greener this side of the fence.

As the author points out, buying a simple a android phone and disabling most of the &quot;smartness&quot; is a much better option.<p>This is what I did and it works surprising well. I still have a decent camera and can use my banking app etc.<p>You could say that I actually have a pretty decent phone I just disciplined myself to use it as little as possible.<p>Edit: the part I am really missing is the compactness of a dumb phone. Years back I had a tiny Xperia Mini and liked the size of it. I would love to see a successor at around $300-350.<p>Please make it happen Sony

I too tried to ditch my smartphone, buying one of the re-released Nokias.<p>The experiment was DOA, since there was no way of transferring my contacts from the iPhone to the Nokia. Furthermore, Sweden runs on BankID (an electronic id service) and it wasn’t available for the Nokia.<p>What did work on the other hand, was buying an Apple Watch with cellular. Now my phone is often in my bag&#x2F;car&#x2F;house and I’m still reachable via the Apple Watch, but have no way of doom scrolling.

I don&#x27;t understand these kind of posts. Can&#x27;t people just use a regular smartphone phone and _not_ install Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.?

As others have mentioned, this is not really a dumb phone. Sure it puts some more _friction_ into using modern Internet connected services, but you can still basically do everything a modern phone can do (it has a full modern browser). Heck you even get the modern experience of ads everywhere despite the limited screen and memory (the ads are all modal pages)!<p>In fact, much of the review centers around &quot;smart&quot; features -- things you&#x27;d probably need an Internet connection for -- rather than phone features.<p>For reference, here&#x27;s a video that shows how KaiOS works <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gFMu6a7jL54" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gFMu6a7jL54</a> . I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s pretty smart for a phone! Low resolution non-touch screen, sure. But it has modern website support in case you need it + plenty of communication and SNS apps...<p>If anything, I&#x27;d guess most people are more comfortable ditching the &quot;phone&quot; part of a smartphone (no calls or SMS support) so long as it has Internet. Limiting yourself to no more than WAP-level Internet support (no CSS or JS support at all)? That&#x27;s the true dumb phone experience.

&gt; ...there are apps in KaiOS Store...<p>A phone that can run apps doesn&#x27;t count as a dumbphone on my book. Do I use the term differently than most people? When I think of dumb phone, I think of the StarTAC, probably because it was my first. The RAZR was dumb, too, in my mind. A modern example for me is the Punkt MP02. It runs Android, technically, but you wouldn&#x27;t know it, because you can dobmuch with it but, you know, use it as a phone. That&#x27;s dumb to me, a phone that is a mostly just a phone.

&quot;Out of concern for my privacy I have decided to switch to a phone that has an abandoned OS and I type messages to my wife using WhatsApp&quot;<p>seriously?

Just a tip -- I use my apple watch and leave my phone at home. I can listen to podcasts and music, call and read emails and texts, use maps and the fitness app. I save up all my emails and texts for when I&#x27;m sitting down and with my ipad. Turns out, when I&#x27;m with friends or my girlfriend or commuting i don&#x27;t <i>need</i> a phone. And when I&#x27;m at work or home or in a cafe I have my ipad or computer.<p>It&#x27;s not for everyone, just saying there exists devices between dumb and smart phone for those of us who wants to tune out a little bit.<p>Edit: Re battery, I’d say 12 hours. If i use it a whole lot, which i rarely do, i’d say 6 hours. Whenever i come home, i put it on the charger by the door, next to my keys.

Life is too short to waste distracted by a smartphone. I prefer to use a the large screen and keyboard of a laptop for communication. I am still using a 2G phone with a B&amp;W display for emergencies, for example if I get lost or held up meeting friends. Even then I&#x27;ll have discussed a contingency with them - the old-fashioned way. I pay next to nothing to keep the account open, and the tap-texting naturally limits my desire to use it for more. Rue the day that GSM is shut down. I also have some text alerts set up from a script running at home to let me know about urgent things.

I tried moving to a proper dumb phone, a Nokia 105, a few years back. I found out that it’s a massive social disadvantage, very isolating and means you have to carry more crap around all the time and keep more context in your head. It’s ten times more difficult to adapt to changes without information at hand. Experiment ended after three months and I’m glad it did.<p>I get the ideological thing here but realistically smart phones are a really really good bit of tech and I adore mine.

I also switched to a Nokia 230 ~2 years ago, first just as an experiment, haven&#x27;t gone back so far.<p>I tried a KaiOS based phone also in that time, but that was so unbelievably unstable that I ditched it after using it for two weeks or so.<p>I still have a smartphone powered off in a drawer, that I pick whenever I need that (~once a month, for banking stuff, using Google Maps to drive to another city, etc). I have Telegram running on my laptop and a few other things like the app for my mowing robot.<p>In general, also at work, I like to mute all notifications if I need to focus, heavy Pomodoro user, too.<p>There are not that many downsides for me. Sometimes someone asks me to send a phone number to them, which is only possible via Bluetooth. So I need to write the number down on a piece of paper, type it back into an SMS and send it. What a waste of time - I first thought. But in reality, that dump phone saves much more time, than these little pieces of manual effort cause, so in the end, I still have more free time. I was surprised at how often I do things that I don&#x27;t need to do that often, e.g. checking my bank account balance.

My approach on this problem was first to use the dedicated Apple&#x27;s solution, that is the time management control panel. Spoiler, that never worked as I would turn on and off the constraints based on my needs. I was consistently unsatisfied and endlessly blaming my lack of will. Thus, I really understand the point of view of the author to readily constraint himself with the hardware instead of software knobs easy to turn off.<p>Rather of buying a new phone, it worked for me to just live with my iPhone 6 until today. It became so slow that it achieves pretty much the same behavioral perks but still supports a wider range of useful features imho like keeping my Spotify account usable on my commute. Opposidely, my reddit addiction -- and news sites in general -- completely disappeared as the website now takes seconds to load and the panel advocating to download the app takes up half the screen making it just unusable.

This is not a &quot;dumbphone&quot;; those don&#x27;t exist anymore now that the 3G networks have been turned off.<p>This &quot;dumb&quot; phone has an entire main-CPU OS, a web browser (!), and then <i>another</i> entire OS on the modem chip (which, of course, runs code which you have absolutely no influence over).<p>I miss dumbphones.

I had several life-changing events occur early 2021, which led to me not using any telephone services, whatsoever (until late 2021). Instead, I purchased a one-way pager (Pagers Direct) on a two-year contract, for &lt;$9&#x2F;month.<p>When I tell people to &quot;page me,&quot; I get one of two responses:<p>A) &quot;What does that mean?!&quot; (typically younger folks, less than thirty), or<p>B) [Initial Disbelief] &quot;They still make those?!&quot; (typically older folks, above forty)<p>I absolutely love it; of course this affects my social life... except that I run with an extremely small crowd, in a particularly small subset of my mid-sized US town.<p>I now have access to my cell phone, but it never leaves my house (used essentially as a landline, because it costs less than a local landline); I will BLOCK my Caller ID when making phone calls to anybody (outside a few trusted contacts), and I never hand out my new cell phone number (and disabled my decades-used phone#).<p>To each his own — I am mid-30s, and used to be 1337 ... never really understood cell phone culture, and am happily marching to my own beat!

I&#x27;d buy a Nokia 3210 if the _ONLY_ upgrades were: 1. (even) better battery, 2. (even) less power consumption, 3. (even) better signal reception and (4) support for modern phone providers (so I can actually make calls and send texts with it no matter where I am).<p>I don&#x27;t want a new display, case, operating system software or anything else, and that&#x27;s why the 3310 falls short.

I thought it was funny how the author explained typing text messages and also T9, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T9_%28predictive_text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T9_%28predictive_text</a> Then again I realised that many younger people might had never have heard of them. Time flies.

&gt; If you are looking to keep your smartphone life, don’t get this phone, or any dumb phone for that matter. Instead, get a budget Android device.<p>This is exactly what I did after trying a dumb phone. I have to say asisd from all the diversions, smarthpones do bring very nice features. I just wouldnt want to miss E-Banking, 2FA for some of my apps and so on. This is why I bought a Wiko Y81 for 60$ and I continue to love this phone. It is so painfully slow that it truly allowed me to get my social media habbits off. However while being slow it is still a solid phone, reading, listening to spotify and doing emergency stuff (like retrieving a lost boarding card from google drive) works fine. What&#x27;s even better is due to its weak screen the battery lasts forever! It&#x27;s so refreshing to just leave the house with 15% battery for the day and still getting through.

I used one of the variants of the Nokia 100s model for 3 years. (2017 - 2020). After using these dumb phones my habit changed and I don&#x27;t exclusively rely on my phone anymore. Even though I have a smartphone now, it is practically useless when I am _inside_ my room. I use my phone to just communicate and occasionally read PDFs. It doesn&#x27;t have any social media apps, so the worst I do is browse the web once in a while.<p>But one huge advantage smartphone has is the camera and the maps. These are really the killer feature for a smartphone. Everything else is a bonus!<p>The bonus includes mobile banking, receiving important emails, and so on!<p>Life is simple when you throw away the cancer apps from smartphones. Then proceed to use it as it should be used i.e. just a phone!

The particular Nokia device mentioned in this article is now a little out of date. It will not receive any new updates. The Google service might even stop working on it (depending on where you live). The author will soon be quite upset. The next version of KaiOS is on the way, sans Google services, but with baked in FB and Twitter.<p>For the gadget tweakers, this device can be &quot;hacked&quot; a little and have alternative apps loaded (and bloatware removed) so that is a plus. Its sister device, the Nokia 800 Tough, is also tweakable and can be set up so the batter lasts 4 to 5 days (getting rid of all bloatware and making it an SMS&#x2F;Telephone will do that to most phones though).

&gt; Apps including WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, as well as others that you can install from KaiOS Store.<p>&gt; Google Assistant. It’s not deeply integrated with the device (more on this below) but it can still be useful for voice text entry and quick Google lookups.<p>&gt; Ability to sync your email, contacts and calendar, or simply import your contacts from a third-party service.<p>What makes this a &quot;dumb phone&quot; then?

I too am using a Nokia KaiOS phone (8110 in my case) from time to time.<p>Two flaws of the device that I think would make it hard to use as a primary are the short battery life (far from the fabled 10 day charge of yore) and the short key travel distance that makes it very easy to do multiple presses by mistake. The second thing is particularly annoying when entering your PIN (if you decide to use one).

I decided to uninstall all social media apps and even the browser from my phone. It&#x27;s working great. Sometimes I really need the browser and I temporarily reinstall it. But it&#x27;s awesome not to have this constant distraction in my pocket, and I can still use whatsapp and listen to podcasts in my commute without any doomscrolling. I also have the wikipedia app.

I did the same thing and switched to a Nokia Flip. So far, my experience is the same. But my actual goal is the Mudita Pure [1], which is supposed to arrive soon-ish.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mudita.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;phones&#x2F;mudita-pure&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mudita.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;phones&#x2F;mudita-pure&#x2F;</a>

Knew immediately it was the 2720. It&#x27;s all around a fantastic phone. The wifi tethering helps also if you carry around a laptop and spotify&#x2F;whatsapp&#x2F;google maps built in is also great.<p>Imagine a 3g, pre 4g phone. Basically that&#x27;s what it is.<p>they&#x27;re just hard to find for a good reason. :)

I switched to a real dumb phone (Nokia 105) as part of a lockdown project to re-focus my life and reduce my personal dependence on technology (which I strongly believe mostly gets in the way of being an effectual and productive human). One of the best choices I ever made.

The only way I ever ditched my smartphone as a daily driver for any long period of time was by using an Apple Watch instead. All the communication and notifications I need, without the distractions of unlimited possibilities on a smartphone.

Is there a way to install an OTP auth app on a Nokia feature phone?

It&#x27;s called a feature phone, produced by HMD Global not Nokia, also KaiOS is crap and too unstable for regular use even compared with Android version 2

I expect that at some point, owning a dumb phone becomes cool again, like vinyl.

... played a lot of snake ...<p>If it was anything like my old Nokia dumb phone days.

Does it support voip? Calling family regularly abroad.