V. Time for my smartphone to retire?

Web browser, camera, notepad, media player, portable gaming system, GPS… and phone! The smartphone replaced a large number of devices and has been for quite some time the main vessel in the war for attention.

While I’m overall really satisfied with my Fairphone 4 – I’ve written a review after 3 years of ownership last year – I’ve been thinking about putting it to rest and replace it with a basic mobile phone instead; these so-called dumbphones or featurephones consume less human and electrical energy to work. It might look like a simple enough task and a small change of habits but after giving it some thought I realized it’s an intricate process and getting rid of your smartphone isn’t that easy or a decision that only impacts yourself as it seems.

The market is a wasteland

Twenty years ago, I chose a brand new cell phone as a birthday gift. I fell in love with the famous – and still trendy – Motorola RAZR V3. Its clamshell design with the small screen, its camera, built-in MP3 player and its huge colourful screen and stylish keyboard convinced me as much as the social approval I’d get from my friends and acquaintances. I didn’t think twice about it, I really wanted that RAZR V3 to replace my used Samsung D500, despite being able to choose between multiple others models manufactured by Nokia, LG, Sagem or Sony Ericsson and the likes. Today, we still have different smartphones brands but the flavour is roughly the same. If you’re not choosing an iPhone, you’re very likely stuck with Android – and unless you’re knowledgeable, you’re not really able to tell if your friend owns a Xiaomi, Honor or Oppo since they all kind of look the same because they share the same form factor.

This being said, if you’re looking at the less popular (and as much cheaper) cellular phones, the market has become barren as hell and I had a lot of trouble to even find a proper device from a reputable brand, hoping it would net me a proper build quality and a legal warranty that I could benefit from if needed. Even if this family of devices is said to be slightly more popular because people are realizing how terrible the social networks are, they are pretty much a niche product nowadays. If you’re asking your favourite search engine about “dumbphones” or “featurephones”, you’ll likely get a metric ton of AI slop or vastly outdated blog posts about some devices which aren’t even sold anymore, or they’re being sold for as much as 2 year old iPhone because they’re one of the few dumbphones that aren’t completely crap.

There are multiple reasons I love Reddit for – the fact that I could broaden my knowledge about these devices thanks to the r/dumbphone subreddit is one of them. If you look at it, you’ll realize that there is, in fact, a lot of dumbphones available worldwide. The issue is that a lot of them aren’t sold or distributed in Europe so they won’t work with our network frequencies. There are also a non-negligible share that are designed for specific usages (damage, liquid, dust resistance, low and high temperature usage, etc.) with their matching design, that are tailored towards the elderly and the “hybrids” like the Punkt. MP02, the Dumbdroid or the Light Phone, but they aren’t dumbphones per se – and their prices reflect this; so you’re left with a handful of devices, mainly from HMD (formerly Nokia).

I was plenty aware that I wouldn’t be spoiled with choices and that I’d have to accept to cut back on my perfect checklist. I would have loved a clamshell phone with a 4G hotspot – I’ll come back to it a bit later. I don’t need a camera, a radio, a MP3 player or whatever. I wanted a cell phone that was able to make and receive calls and text messages with a 4G support since the 2G or 3G networks are being phased out, and obviously with a design that I’d like since I like as much the functionality of a device as its aesthetics.

Focus on the HMD devices. The legendary 3310 is being reincarnated in a model that promises the same robustness and reliability as the original one while being modern with its colour screen. Along with it, some candy-bar entry level phones and a clamshell phone. A large number of devices are phased out or out of order. The clamshell phone piqued my interest – it’s the 2660 Flip, which seems to be already four years old and that was re-branded from Nokia to HMD 2 years ago. The reviews are a bit of a mixed bag: the battery looks pretty disappointing for such a phone, its building quality seems a bit cheap and the internal software prone to bugs – these complaints are also shared with other HMD phones, though. However, let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about the most expensive HMD cell phone sold right now at €80 so I guess we can’t expect this device to last for ten years, especially on such a niche market. No matter, I’ll look at the other devices, mainly the candy-bar phones (HMD 105, 235…). They’re half as cheap and their reviews are somehow worse. Looks like the network reception is awful and the mic quality terrible that the phone calls sound really bad, which is ironically funny since these devices literally have no other utility outside of making and receiving phone calls; of course, they don’t offer any 4G hotspot functionality so I ruled them out.

HMD devices not making the cut, I’m checking some other manufacturers like Alcatel or Panasonic but else they have nothing to sell, else the devices don’t meet my aesthetics criteria. I can find some interesting phones on some popular marketplaces but I don’t trust the resellers enough, I don’t know where does the phone come from, I’m not sure if it could work with the European frequencies, if I could send it back and get a refund, well you name it, even if it is €50, I’m not willing to waste them and end up with a glorified paperweight. The used market isn’t really better as the resellers know very well the qualitative devices are sought after so you have to pay €200 for a phone that’s already 5 or 6 years old, and there’s no reason to pick a non-4G phone as the 2G and 3G network depreciation will render them completely useless while their chips are still properly working.

To sum it up, the first obstacle that I’m facing to give up on my smartphone is to find a decent phone! The HMD 2660 Flip could’ve been a good enough phone but it’s not being sold anymore by HMD and it doesn’t offer a 4G hotspot.

Moving away from owning physical media

All right, I’m patiently waiting for a manufacturer to sell a decent featurephone as I’m not in a hurry. My Fairphone is also my audio player, camera and notepad, so I might need to find alternatives to fill in the blanks if I ever switch to a dumbphone.

Let’s focus on the audio player side of things. In a similar fashion, the market for portable audio players is now clear from the mainstream brands (may the Apple iPod, Creative Zen and Sony Walkman rest in peace) but that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made from audio lovers by Sony or other less popular brands like Cowon, FiiO or HiBy. Actually, there is a large panel of devices available within a wide pricing range, meaning it’s pretty easy to find a positively-reviewed portable audio player to replace your smartphone built-in abilities. I had chosen the HiBy X1 that looked like the best choice for roughly €80. While pretty inexpensive, these devices are equipped with a large colour touch screen, they offer Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, a 16, 32 or 64GB built-in memory that can be extended with a microSD card and they can be brought to life by Android or some GNU/Linux-based operating system. In some way, they remind me of what the French manufacturer Archos was selling during the 2000s (may this brand also rest in peace).

If it is pretty easy to acquire a portable audio player, the way we acquire and play said music has drastically changed since then. Before we were paying for a subscription to a streaming service, we had to get our hands on a CD (or tapes for the eldest and wisest or us all…), be it by borrowing, renting or buying it. If we bought a CD, the artist got a (small) fraction of the price as a “wage”. That changed as technology evolved and music turned into digital goods. Piracy was the industry’s Nemesis during the 2000s, until some streaming services appeared – albeit not always legal since there was kind of a grey area (remember radio.blog.club?) – triggering the paradigm shift. Nowadays, music is mainly played through these streaming services and the artists are being paid based on the streams volume (in reality, the top 1% earns 99% of the revenue). The main vector being the smartphone, everyone who’s subscribed to such a service can listen to millions of records without having to think twice about it since every artist will get their share.

By giving up on a smartphone, we’re back to the 2000s, but still living in 2026’s consumerism. While it’s true that you can still buy your favourite artists’ CDs if they’re popular, it can get harder if you’re into less popular genres or artists – some them aren’t producing physical material anymore – as you might need to look for some imports, which isn’t impossible nonetheless. What are you going to do with your disc once you get your hands on it? It’s not like you can “rip” it into MP3 or FLAC files. I don’t think there are still computers sold today that include an optical drive. Unless you’re equipped at home, you might not even be able to give it a spin, so what gives? You may also consider your own library size: every single, album or compilation has to be “ripped” from the physical media into a digital file. You’re giving up on the algorithm-based recommendations, and you can’t just spin any album that you might be interested in unless you already went through the copy process beforehand. All the music has to be locally stored in the audio player.

Obviously, if you want to rebuild your local music library, you might think about piracy like the good old days. On one hand, I agree that it might be the fastest and easiest way to fill up the built-in memory and pump up the numbers but the artists aren’t seeing any money from that. I’m also against piracy in this case as I want the artists to be fairly compensated for their hard work and their creations – mind you, I didn’t always have this point of view, especially when I was younger, I “guess” being financially stable helps; on the other hand, I’m pretty disgusted by both the economical model enforced by the streaming services and especially Spotify and its CEO who makes me feel like I’ve caught severe diarrhoea.

I’m a bit at a crossroads here. I could say I’m going to acquire, through legal means or piracy the music I’m listening to. I could buy the albums, vinyl records and whatever goodies the artists are selling on top of going to their shows and spend more money at the merch for the bands I enjoy the most, but I’m not really a fan of having a “worthiness” scale, even though I wouldn’t think much about illegally downloading the tenth The Dark Side of The Moon remaster while it would hurt me to do the same with The Blue Nowhere by Between the Buried And Me. In this very case, going back without a smartphone doesn’t lead to the same issue as it’s fairly easy to find a device compared to a proper phone, but it’s the economical system that changed and that puts the consumers in a walled garden unless you don’t want the artists to make a living off their work. One could argue that it’s because of this economical model that they aren’t, and they’re right but piracy isn’t the answer either. I agree that the streaming services bring almost endless choice and we’re addicted to it but this need has been created ex nihilo by the industry only to its own benefit.

Do you want or do you need these?

I’ve talked about the music player side of things, so I’m going to focus on the other roles my smartphone is filing up for.

The first one is the camera. While the first “photophones” appeared before the smartphones, they were pretty basic and weren’t meant to replace a real camera. You could take basic pictures to capture something on the spot so you wouldn’t miss it or it would turn into your screen background, but printing them wouldn’t necessarily yield the best results. As the smartphones became more powerful and equipped with better cameras (also being refined by better software) while being more affordable, the compact cameras that were still relevant especially against entry-level smartphones began to be phased out. The smartphones also created a bunch of new “needs” since we’re taking selfies, scanning documents and checking whatever there is to eat at a restaurant because the menus are now on a QR-code. Well, if you trade your smartphone for a dumbphone, you’ll realize that these needs are completely superficial. Taking a selfie is never critical and you can ask the staff for a physical menu. Even though I don’t take a lot of pictures – I don’t think my life is interesting enough to take a bunch of selfies every day or pictures of what my commute looks like to share them to people I barely know, I’ve been having a camera for more than 20 years in my pocket, as bad as it was retrospectively on my RAZR V3 and as good enough it is on my Fairphone 4 today, I have to admit I’d be frustrated if I ever wanted to capture something, someday, in the streets, in a store, a bird or whatever and I couldn’t; so I’ve started to look for a compact camera that could stay in my backpack that I’m carrying everyday when I get out of the house anyway. Well, there’s not much to think about. Kodak has a couple of entry-level digital cameras that are reasonably priced, there is the famous and trendy Polaroid for which my innate cynicism makes me think that at least 90% of them are sitting somewhere on a shelf or in a drawer, with a dead battery, the AC charger nowhere to be found and with less than 50 pictures taken during their lifetime and that’s pretty much it unless you’re going over the €500 budget for which you can get your hands on professional compacts, bridge, DSLRs or mirrorless cameras which might seem overkill to carry everyday just so you can take a couple of pictures a month. This is the difference between the audio player market where a sub-€100 device will do its job just fine while you’re not going really far away with a €100 camera; one might think about the used market but that can still be a lot of value carried everyday so point-and-shoot could be the best compromise. Compacts were usually cheap all around, so what about the internal battery? Can you replace it? How long does it last before needing a charge? What about the picture quality? Speaking from experience, a 10-year old compact camera won’t really do better than any smartphone nowadays. I’ve had a Sony Cybershot digital camera while I had an iPhone 3GS and the pictures taken by the smartphone were as good – and I’m pretty sure that if we’d look at the pictures taken by said iPhone 3GS we’d think they were a product of their time.

The second one is being my notebook. This one is probably the easiest as a small notebook and even a entry-level fountain pen don’t cost much and are really easy to carry – as a matter of fact, I already do. While it’s obvious that I won’t be able to snap some pictures or format my notes as much as I can do on a dedicated app, it doesn’t really matter since I can write back these notes on my computer once I’m at home and I really enjoy handwriting; it wouldn’t feel like I’m going back in time.

Last and not least, I’m also using my smartphone as a GPS. I don’t frequently use my car as I rely on public transportation to commute and I love travelling by train; when I take my car to go from A to B, it usually makes more sense to me so I use the GPS to be as efficient as fast as I can. I own an Abarth 595 which has a built-in media and navigation system so I could definitely rely on it, even though I’m not sure it’s either completely up-to-date nor I’d be willing to pay the update fee if it was possible. There are some more modern alternatives to the good old Michelin fold map: I could use the itinerary planners like Mappy or Viamichelin. All things considered, I feel better if I can rely on a GPS when I go for a drive somewhere I’m not familiar with but I’m not often enough in this kind of situations to feel the need to keep my smartphone and its up-to-date maps and GPS sensor.

Appreciating being unavailable

On a daily basis, my smartphone makes me feel connected in a social way. WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are my main messaging apps. They’ve completely made SMS and even phone calls obsolete. This trifecta isn’t available on the traditional cell phones. I won’t mention here the popular social networks which also offer some messaging services like Facebook Messenger or Instagram, since I’m not on said networks – I only have a LinkedIn profile. Without a smartphone, I’d still be able to use said messaging apps though, since they offer a desktop or web application that I could connect to when I’m at home or at work, but not when I’m running errands or going on an adventure. Should I ditch my Fairphone, people would need to send me a text message instead of WhatsApp messages I can’t read. This reminds me of when I deleted my Facebook account when this social network was still popular; I knew I’d lose contact with some people who didn’t change their habits for me, but I think I’d be a bit too self-centered to hold a grudge against these people. I’m fully aware of what the consequences are when you’re not really going with the flow and I’m ready to accept these.

I talked about the 4G hotspot feature in the first section. I could do without it but it can be game changing if I ever need to access the internet through another device like a tablet so I can check an itinerary, order an Uber, check the public transports status, and whatnot. All in all, a lot of our life habits are tied to the smartphone and this internet connection at the tip of our fingers, making our digital breaks harder than they should be as we need to accept some drawbacks or to think about working things out differently. Nonetheless, one could argue that switching from a smartphone to a dumbphone and keeping all along a device that can access the internet through the 4G network isn’t really “disconnecting” especially when it’s on a mobile device and not at home on a computer. This can be a first step towards the ultimate goal though, since the tablet is less convenient to use on-the-fly than a phone; therefore, you can stay connected if needed while being free of notifications, attention consuming apps and tracking from the smartphone.

Wrapping it up

All of the above makes me kind of wary to switch and turn off my smartphone. I haven’t found a proper cell phone I can see myself using because there’s only a handful of proper models being manufactured and properly sold in Europe, the 2G and 3G networks being phased out don’t help either settling for an older device. I also struggle to find a middle ground between legally consuming or resorting to piracy to build my new music library. Last but not least, sadly, our world now makes it harder not to be constantly connected through a smartphone because it assumes everyone owns one.

I like to think that if I had found a proper cell phone (clamshell, decent battery life, 4G connectivity, and a design that I’d dig), I would probably have accepted it not having a 4G hotspot. It would have been the start of my “digital detox” and everything else would’ve followed. I would’ve settled down on a compromise for music (physical media for the small bands and piracy for the others where the money goes into the corporations more than the artists themselves) and I’ve done without if I need to order an Uber or a GPS when I’m on foot. A good cell phone replacing my Fairphone would’ve been motivating and the start of something new. Alas, I think I’ll have to wait for a bit – in the meantime, I’ll continue thinking about it to prepare for the moment I’ll truly to be ready to retire my smartphone.