Keeping It Semi-Stupid

With people raving about the capabilities of the new iPhone X, with its facial recognition security and “all-screen” design and other capabilities, and new apps flooding the market every day, other people have decided they want to move in the opposite direction.

Rather than trying to get the smartest smartphone out there, they’ve decided to dumb it down.  They don’t want to micromanage their lives through their phones and be totally wired in to every known and developing form of social media at every moment of the day.  They don’t want to get little dings and buzzes and snatches of music when a text arrives or a check clears in their bank account or they hit their step goal for the day.  In short, they are tired of their phones being a key focus of their lives.

Some manufacturers are responding to this apparent impulse on the part of some people by producing consciously dumb phones.  One “new” product only takes and makes calls, and it sells for only a fraction of the cost of the brainiac smart phones.  Imagine!  A cell phone that simply functions as . . . a phone!  Another option, slightly more expensive, lets you talk, text, set alarms, and use a calendar.  Other manufacturers are offering “back to basics” options that promise longer battery life.

Or, you can do what I’ve done, which is never add many apps to your cell phone in the first place.  My phone functions as a phone, an email and text repository, a camera, a clock, and a place to play Spider Solitaire when I’m waiting for an appointment.  As smartphones go, it’s about at third-grade level.  In the modern world of business, where being accessible at all times is taken for granted, you really can’t get by without being quickly reachable by phone or email or text, and the other features come in handy.  But I don’t want to spend my life staring and tapping away at a phone, or being distracted by prompts, or feeling like everything I do is being monitored and measured.

I’d like to think there is life outside of my cell phone.  Is that so dumb?