Embrace the Dumbphone

It's almost enough to make you stop doomscrolling: dull devices are now cool. The Boring Phone is a new, featureless flip phone that is feeding the growing appetites of younger people who want to bin their smartphones in favour of a dumbphone...

The Magic Crystal
Frank Bernard Dicksee (1853-1928)
Photo Credit: Lady Lever Art Gallery [CC BY-NC]  

The Boring Phone is part of a new dumbphone boom, built on the suspicion of gen Z towards the data-and-attention-harvesting technologies they have grown up with. That suspicion has fuelled reinventions of retro cultural artefacts - a trend known as Newtro, and seen in the revival of vinyl, cassettes, fanzines, 8-bit video games and old-fashioned phones...

"There is evidence of this generation modifying their smartphone behaviour, with concerns around the negative impacts of being constantly digitally connected driving this," Birch  [Technology analyst at the research firm - Mintel] added. "Three in five gen-Zers say they'd like to be less connected to the digital world."...

Twentysomethings are also more concerned about privacy, according to the technology analyst Portulans Institute, in an internet that can seem more like a surveillance tool for brands, governments and scammers than a place to pursue interests and find interesting people...

Piers Garrett, a 27 year-old tech sales executive tried to achieve that balance by getting a Light Phone - a device that that uses the same electronic ink used for e-readers and has no apps - but eventually gave up.

"The idea was amazing, but I only lasted six months," he said. "Everyone communicates via WhatsApp. So now I have a happy medium. I'm very strict with my apps - just banking apps and train apps, and I turn off all my notifications. Now when I wake up in the morning, I do things for myself - have a coffee, read a book. And I noticed the change - so much more clarity in my mind."

(James Tapper & Aneesa Ahmed, The Observer, 2024)

Anything that can make people less reliant on their smartphones is a plus. And good old Piers who is now able to do things for himself and has less brain fog. What  a bizarre world we live in.