I think the solution is not a dumbphone but a full android e-ink phone. Horrendous for everything that involves video but runs every app and can be used as an ereader.
Unfortunately I have to found one that speaks to me, as they are all from Chinese manufactures with questionable quality.
I like the idea here and tried this. It took 3 months to ship. The keyboard was really frustrating to use. Maybe a landscape layout keyboard that slides out would have worked better. I'm surprised anyone can use this comfortably because I have very small fingers.
It also is a pretty big brick to carry around. I remember it being sort of randomly buggy but haven't used it in months, so I don't remember the specific things that were issues.
This was the way for me.
I spent a good few years trying proper dumbphones, but I always needed an app for something. Carrying two phones didn't work, no off the shelf 'Smart, yet dumb' phone had the particular mix of features I needed.
The best half way house I found was a Nokia 2720, it runs Kai OS (Formerly Firefox OS), so very easy to throw a quick app together and add new features as needed. Unfortunately all the important apps were similarly thrown together, battery life was awful, calls, alarms and messages came through when they felt like it, the T9 predictive text was diabolically bad.
I went back to basic android for a while, tried all sorts of settings and methods to cut back, but I am just too vulnerable to their flashy attention grabbing tricks.
But the e-ink? Hot damn it worked. Everything I actually needed, and just enough friction that I don't use any more.
The lack of colour certainly neutralises a lot of the attention grabbing tactics, but I think the real difference for me is the lack of fluidity. It's always just a device, and never reaches extension of self territory. It is truly refreshing how many times I've left the house without it and only noticed a few hours later.
As for manufacturers and quality, I went with a Hisense A9 as it seemed to have the best open source support at the time. It was a bit pricey considering the general specs, but when the screen is the bottleneck you don't miss the processor speed or camera quality.
(I actually quite like the lousy photo experience, it feels a bit more like film, or early digital where you just have to shoot and hope it comes out ok)
Despite that, I've ended up sticking with the manufacturer ROM with just a few tweaks.
Perhaps its selling all my data to the CCP, but it's rock solid and much more polished than any cheap android phone I've used previously.
It's really well set up to get the best from the hardware too, in a way that the lineage port couldn't quite match.
If you think it might work for you, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.
The main caveat I'd offer if you're trying to reduce your screen time is that it doesn't work if you primarily waste time reading. Reading is a joy with this, and I am much more likely than before to pick up an e-book or finish a long article I'd otherwise have skimmed.
Other quirks of the A9 if anyone is considering it:
- The GNSS receiver is atrocious, it regularly fails to get a fix in clear open fields.
- It's a small battery, low power phone. I usually get most of a week out of a charge, but one heavy background app can drop that to less than a day. Discord was the worst until stopping all background activity, WiFi hotspot is also pretty brutal on the battery.
- The stock OS has a deliberately very limited notification system. Get used to intentionally checking for messages every now and then
- Doesn't play nice with non-chinese carriers. Out of the box I had intermittent SMS, no VoLTE and regular call drops. All fixable via shuffling some files around over ADB though, see XDA for the how to
- All specs are OK. The camera is OK. The speakers are OK. The processor processes. That's all you get.
- Some apps are just not E-Ink friendly. Spotify and google maps are the worst I use regularly. Scrolling, full screen movement, contrast and dark themes are the enemy. They are both totally useable, but it can take more than a glance.
- No IP rating, I don't go swimming with it but it sure rains a lot here and I don't like having to care
+ The 3.5mm output is gorgeous, sounds fantastic with any headphones I've tried. Easily the best of any smartphone I've used
+ It is very nice E-Ink. Lots of totally useable apps for the A9 would not be so on a lesser screen.
+ Though I rarely use it, the frontlight is very nice to have and intuitively controlled
Because they lobbied for a rule change to get fast tracked to an index forcing passive investors to buy it at IPO price instead of being included after market value corrections.
This is completely wrong. Passive funds don't buy at IPO price. They buy after the inclusion rebalance which happens weeks later, at whatever price the market has already set. Plus the S&P500 rule change hasn't even happened yet, it's unclear if the rules in the current form will go through.
He touches on this on the website and I agree with his statement
> I do feel a lot of nostalgia for the days of trying to pack four people, four computers, and four monitors into one car on the way to a friends' LAN party, setting up machines on haphazardly arranged card tables with questionable seating arrangements, daisy-chaining power strips and network hubs. I'm a little less nostalgic for the experience of trying to copy game files over the network to get everyone on the same version, or pitying the one friend who inevitably has to reinstall Windows and doesn't manage to get in-game until after midnight. [...] Even the most enthusiastic of us didn't really want to do all that more than, like, 3-4 times a year, and a lot of people—even those who like games—really don't care to do it at all. I'm not even sure if I could do it anymore, as a 40-something with two kids!
Yeah a few of us who used to LAN together picked up on this article independently. We all came to the conclusion most of us are on Macs now, and GFN seemed like the path of least resistance.
One of Concordes problems was also that it was not that much faster for how uncomfortable it was. For London -> NY, You were looking at 7 hours in a luxurious business class vs 3.5 hours in a crammed noisy shaking metal tube for twice the price.
Another factor might be that Apple knows that its days are numbered when it comes to charging giant premiums over Windows and Android hardware and getting away with it because of its purportedly superior ease of use.
If you are of the generation that grew up with a smartphone, Windows and Mac are no different vis-a-vis the learning curve. You will need to learn how to use filesystems, learn window management and install desktop applications on both. And let's face it, that generation is using Gmail and Google Docs that are identical across platforms. The difference isn't worth handing Apple a huge chunk of cash to upgrade to 16GB RAM.
I think for a long time Apple could grow by introducing new hardware categories, growing the average spend on hardware (by e.g. moving from upgradable to soldered memory/disks), and additional services.
It has been a while since they introduced category-changing new devices and people hold on to their iPhones/iPads/Apple Watches longer due to smaller changes between generations and long software support periods.
So, the primary way that they see how they could grow is by introducing more ads and more subscriptions. Slowly they make Apple's platforms more gross:
- When searching in the app store, nearly half the page is ads now.
- Pushing F1 movie advertisements through Apple Wallet.
- Ads in maps.
- Pushing subscriptions by putting ads for Apple Creator Studio in iWork apps (Pages, Keynote, Numbers).
- Pushing subscriptions by putting Apple Fitness+ ads in the system setting on iOS (!).
This might work for a while, but eventually, Apple will lose a key differentiator.
It is not similar at all. DotA was a completely different game from Warcraft 3, Turtle WoW is just Vanilla WoW with extra content. The core gameplay is the same.
While rust protects against passing and assigning the wrong types and leaving dangling pointers, it does not protect against writing inefficient garbage.
Unfortunately I have to found one that speaks to me, as they are all from Chinese manufactures with questionable quality.
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