Follow up to this post: https://dubvee.org/post/1715655

I’ve completed the first week of my 30 day dumb phone challenge. There were a few hiccups along the way, and I had to break out the old smartphone more often than I’d expected, but overall, it’s still been successful beyond my expectations (my expectations were quite low, and I figured I’d have given up already lol).

I probably won’t be doing weekly updates, but the first week was pretty much expected to be the most challenging, so I figured a follow-up would be warranted.

TL;DR: So far, so good, and I’m actually enjoying it rather than tolerating it as I initially expected.

Main Challenges

MFA for my work VPN

That was, by far, the most frequent cause of having to break out my smartphone. Despite changing my default MFA method from app notification to code, nine times out of ten, the VPN would still try to send the app push. This is made worse by the really crappy VPN my work offers that will, on a good day, disconnect you at random one or more times per workday (sadly, I have no say in what product we use for that). Needless to say, the old phone remained at arm’s length most of the workday (though I was successful in keeping it “out of sight, out of mind”)

On day 3, it started to prompt for a TOTP token about half the time (yay, progress), and since day 5, it’s asked every time. Why it took 3-5 days for that change to be fully effective is beyond me. Note to self: If I ever do change back to app push, never lose my phone.

Looking up Business Phone Numbers

I was out running errands and needed to call a local business to see if they had a specific thing in stock (the big box store I was near was out). Rather than run back to the parking lot and grab my smartphone from my car, I re-enabled the mobile browser to grab their number from their website. While this went against the spirit of the experiment, my old dumb phone way back when did have a primitive mobile browser which I used similarly, so I’m going to let this slide. I’ve also left the mobile browser enabled since needing to lookup a business phone number while out and about is not an uncommon situation.

Pokemon Go

Ok, so this is purely an indulgence, but I do have a very long, unbroken streak going on Pokemon Go. I’m not really a die-hard player anymore, but I do refuse to break my streak. So every morning when I let the dogs out, I sit on the patio, drink my coffee, and catch my daily Pokemon as well as play a few of my daily word games. For those purposes, the smartphone is basically a wifi tablet/Game Boy that gets used for about 15 minutes and then put away. I can live with that.

As far as the challenges go, that was pretty much it. Looking at the contemporary slate of feature phones (most of the ones I looked at run KaiOS), a web browser is pretty standard so I didn’t really cheat much at all by re-enabling it. As far as “feature completeness” is concerned, re-enabling the web browser seems to cover all my known bases.

General Experience

It’s certainly been different. I still have the “itch” to pull out my phone and start scrolling at the first hint of boredom, but having this pseudo dumb phone is kind of like wearing oven mitts to keep you from scratching when you had chickenpox as a child lol. I’ve found myself taking in my environment more, being more observant of people/things around me, and generally listening to a lot more music when I need a distraction.

Beyond that, it’s been great not getting notifications for every little thing, and there’s been very little FOMO with not being “always on” in multiple IM apps. People were also quick to start reaching me via SMS instead of IM.

The other thing I’m really enjoying is just using this thing. It just feels so much more comfortable in my hand than any of the cookie-cutter rectangles I’ve used for the last 16 years. It took a little less than a day to get back into the full swing of tap and T9 typing, but I’m enjoying that, too (or maybe I’m just enjoying physical keys again). I have to make far fewer corrections than with the on-screen keyboards, and going back to fix a mistake is way less frustrating with physical arrow keys than the stupid finger slide smartphones use.

I’ve also quickly gotten spoiled by not having to suckle at the teat of the nearest USB cable throughout the day. Partly because I’m not scrolling on it all day and partly because there’s just less phone the battery has to support, it easily lasts all day with plenty to spare. It’ll get unplugged around 6am and only be down to 65% or so by the time I go to bed. I’m used to being well below 65% before lunch lol.

Next Steps

This is only the end of week 1, so I’ve got 3 more weeks to go before I really feel I’m ready to make a decision. Based on initial experience, I probably could go for a true dumb phone, but the only thorn in my side is my bank app. I really hate to lose that, and it’s the only thing I can’t do even with a modern “dumb” phone.

Before beginning this experiment proper, I did play around with this as the smartphone it actually is (I disabled a lot of things on it to dumb it down for this challenge). It’s certainly a weird form factor to use Android with, but it’s got its charms. One thing I noticed was that I could do everything I could do on my main phone. The nice thing, though, was that I just didn’t want to. Like, it was just annoying enough with the small screen and tap/T9 text input that I was happy I could do something if I needed to but was too annoyed to make a habit out of it. That said, I very well may un-dumb this when the 30 days are up and keep using it as my daily driver.