Is It Time to Go Back to My Flip Phone?
Back in 2006, I had a really cool phone. It was a Motorola Razr. It made calls and got texts, and did little else. It was thin and lightweight. It made a pleasing sound as it snapped open and shut. “Ooh, a Razr,” people would say, causing me to blush.
Of course, we all know now how abysmally uncool my Razr was about to become. With the rise of the iPhone, so-called “flip” phones or “feature” phones or even “dumb” phones were about to go the way of the dodo. When a friend pulled out a flip phone recently, I asked her if she found it at an archaeological dig.
Now, I bite my tongue. Because for a while, I’ve been secretly hating my iPhone just about as much as I love it. My iPhone does everything for me: it connects me to the world and helps me navigate it. But that power comes with a price: I am forever connected, forever tethered to the vast, teeming, cacophonous internet. Sometimes I want to disconnect–while still leaving open the old-fashioned option of placing a phone call, and only a phone call. (See “Making ‘Dumb’ Phones Smarter and Faster.”)
An intriguing piece by Cnet’s Jessica Dolcourt posits that I’m not alone. Flip phones do not just remain the province of the elderly and the clueless. Increasingly, young, tech-savvy people may be wanting flip or feature phones, as a low-tech (and low-cost) option among their suite of devices. Specifically, tablets may be driving this trend, if indeed a trend it is. Writes Dolcourt: “As tablets take off, there’s a growing number of people who are interested in a tablet’s larger screen, but who don’t feel the need to duplicate their apps and tools on two separate devices.”
This makes perfect sense to me, and yet had never occurred to me before. I’ve spent so much time telling people that I didn’t see the sense in buying an iPad when I already had an iPhone. What I didn’t see is that buying an iPad might finally free me from my iPhone.
Will my next phone, then, be not the iPhone 5, but rather the $20 Samsung t159? I’m feeling a real nostalgia for what feels like the pre-history of 2006, and the pleasing feel of a sleek, simple phone in my pocket.
What do you think? What is the perfect combination of devices to have in your portfolio? If you’ve bought a tablet, do you find your smartphone less essential?
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.