These retro-style phones offer limited functionality, lower costs, and are gaining popularity due to digital well-being concerns. Counterpoint projects feature phone sales to reach $2.8 million by 2023, driven by minimalist movements, cost-effective B2B sales, and budget-conscious consumers.
As if we needed another sign that ZDnet was trash…
I fucking hate these obviously bullshit articles. “Gen Z is using feature phones”, “Gen Z are using paper maps”, “Gen Z is doing XYZ”.
No, they aren’t. At best some sad excuse for a journalist found a handful of tweets and wrote a whole article on it like it’s a “trend”.
Look, I know “journalists” are being squeezed to produce at an unreasonable rate but if you write drivel like this then you have no business calling yourself a journalist, hell I don’t even think you can call yourself a “writer” or “contributor” either. It barely passes as writing and you are contributing nothing to society.
I’ve considered doing this in combination with a Pine phone or other impractical but cool linux phone so that I don’t have to worry about not having at least reliable SMS and calling.
Anyone know if there is a tiny dumb phone out there that doubles as a 4G/5G hotspot?
I use a TCL Flip 2, bought it unlocked on ebay for $40. It has hotspot, mms, and emoji support (can’t remember if the included keyboard has any emoji, since I use a custom one that has some, but the system can recognize and display most emoji people send). It actually runs a slimmed down version of android and you can root it and run some stuff, though most things are a pain to use. I’ve got signal, jerboa, and adaway running on mine, though I haven’t found another browser that plays nice yet.
There’s no rule that says flip phones aren’t allowed to have google pay. I think it’d be cool to see what a current year not-smartphone would look like.
I want an Android phone with a full physical keyboard, blackberry style. Not sure if I want to ‘digital detox’ but I don’t value a lot of what our common phone design has to offer.
Just the other day I saw an article with the exact opposite headline about how Gen z is sticking with the iPhone. Now I don’t know which one is full of shit; but it’s obviously one of them.
Personally I switched to a Qin F22 Pro to curb my smartphone addiction. Only have the essential apps installed on it. So far it has worked out well (I used to have a screen time of over 6 hours every day, now just minutes). Life feels so much more peaceful without all the notification spam I used to get, and my mind is definitely more clear now.
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