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My dumbphone experiment

If we haven't all done it, most of us have probably thought about it: Could I downgrade my smartphone to a dumbphone?

I wouldn't say I'm addicted to my smartphone but it's a constant presence and often not in a good way. So I've got myself a cheap dumbphone and I'm trying it out over the weekend.

The phone came with about a third of a charge in the battery so I'm going to try to make that last the whole weekend. Surprisingly it came with a standard micro-USB charger. It's not illegal to supply a charger with a phone but if I remember correctly that's likely fairly soon.

As with all these kinds of experiments, you never really know what's going to work and what won't. But these are my hopes if not necessarily my expectations:

I could get out of the cycle of replacing an expensive and resource-intensive device too often. The dumbphone is less likely to become obsolete because it doesn't do much to start with. Also, it has a user-replaceable battery. I've done open-heart surgery on smartphones to replace the battery and not only is that risky and time-consuming, the batteries (plus tools) cost me more than this entire phone.

I won't pick up my phone for random internet browsing or similar in odd bits of downtime. The phone actually has the internet but it's obviously so rubbish that it's for emergencies only.

It's a 4G phone so I'm hoping that the call quality and coverage is as good as on my smartphone, which is also 4G. I suspect it's likely that the internal components are a lot less good even though it'll be on the same networks.

There's no camera, so that should completely kill the urge to take whimsical pictures of things just for the sake of it. Of course, if you like whimsical pictures that's fine but to me it's just another one of those minor tech habits that we have just because we can. In a world saturated with images we're not going to miss a few.

I'm not going to name the phone. This isn't the place for consumer reviews much less advertorial. It's the concept and the experience as it relates to my life that matters.