Has anyone found cell only and cheap service (<$20/mo)? (USA) If I have a feature phone, I don’t want data. I looked for years and failed.
Edit: I had failed to notice I am in a thread over a year old.
Tello has a plan with no data for under $10 a month
Finally sorting by recent comments pays off!
Thank you!!
Those plans look great!
This is a thing that isn’t happening, at least not among Gen Z. What a bullshit article.
As a millennial, the thought of ditching my smartphone is a thought that keeps coming up.
Same. I’m beginning to hate having it.
Eh, I don’t like the idea of getting rid of my smart phone. But I did get rid of all the shit I didnt actually like. I use my phone for Music, maps, the camera, messaging a few people, and a few other things. I got rid of all the crap social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even reddit(and have not put a lemmy/kbin app on there to replace it), there is not shit mobile games installed. Just does what I need it to do, and doesnt constantly bug me about Person X and what they had for lunch.
However, if I ditched the smart phone, I would need a phone still, but then I still need the MP3 player, a camera. And I would much rather have 1 bit of kit that does all that well, than 3 items.
I did it for 3 months. I really enjoyed my time doing it and learned a lot about my usage. It was a cheap $50 experiment. After I went back to my smartphone, I uninstalled ALL social media apps. Turned off ALL notifications but left calls and messages as an exception. My smartphone is now essentially a feature phone. It’s not 100% the same since the big screen does lure you in to use it but my usage is still way down and because I don’t have any social media there’s no reason for me to be on my phone around other people. I wholeheartedly recommend trying it for those curious.
That reminded me how a local wanna-be influencer did a smartphone detox for a week, immediately after the completion she posted an FB story: Part 1 - Reflection, how eyeopening the experience was, how much time she suddenly had for the things that truly matter etc. Subscribe to not miss the Part 2!
I just don’t buy new ones. I have a Nokia E90 Communicator and that’s it.
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.
Does it run telegram and google hangouts?
It runs Android so yes. Don’t use Google Services myself.
I though genZ only bought iPhone because of the green bubble or something?
And i thought 90% of them have brain damage in general…
Aren’t they all broke as well?
That was never true to begin with
This same BS headline happens every generation. As soon as any small trends form, the media latch onto it like it’s gonna be the next big thing…
No, feature phones aren’t gaining mass adoption again. No, feature phones aren’t going to kill smartphones. It’s just a subset of people deciding to downgrade, or who want to buy a secondary phone.
Soon hipsters will be carrying wireless rotary phones.
USD$390.
This I wish, but I doubt. I still have my old Garmin GPS and play with the idea of a flip phone but I’ve been spoiled by the smaller things like iMessage not dealing with MMS. It’s an idea I come back to occasionally, but I also think about going back to my Palm with AAA batteries for my PIM needs. Had one in semi-regular-use as recent as 2018!
I’m looking at my Palm T|X or my Psion Revo as two potential revives. The Psion was quite awesome.
I used to have an orange Handspring Visor PIM, which ran the Palm OS. If I’m remembering correctly the original team that developed the Palm Pilot left to start Handspring. My friend topped me by buying the phone module for hers. It seemed almost breathtakingly futuristic at the time.
I heard cassettes are making a comeback too.
Vinyl did lol didn’t expect that one. So maybe.
It did, but I really didn’t.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/7699/lp-sales-in-the-united-states/
They all realized a $100 phone does the same shit as a $1500 phone… There is nothing they add to the expensive phones that justify the price
It’s more about wanting to take a break from looking at a screen and watching shitty ads for so many hours per day.
People need to (re)discover adblockers and alternative apps.
- Firefox+uBlock Origin takes care of nearly all ads on the web.
- NewPipe Lets you watch YouTube without ads (and lets you download videos).
- Pixelfed is like insta without the ads (or people, lets be honest, but you gotta be the change you want to see)
- Mastodon is twitter without ads
- Lemmy reddit without ads
We have the tools and technology, its just a matter of people making the move, but that’s hard because of the network effect.
A $200 smartphone does the same, but the article is about feature phones.
Hell, with all of the features that are being removed these days, there’s no justification for the price.
Now that LG is out of the market, I had to get a Nokia smartphone just to get an external microSD card slot and aux port.
$1000+ phone with capped internal memory for the purpose of pushing subscription cloud storage? Or a $300 phone with expandable physical storage?
I don’t trust these numbers, I really don’t trust any article that talks about my generation.
Get this removeded clickbait garbage off my feed OP
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.
What’s the phone on the left in that top image?
Edit: turns out it isn’t a phone - it’s a Gameboy Advance SP.
One of the Samsung Flips most likely
I thought all the Samsung ones had a screen that covered the whole of the inside section? This one only had a screen on the top.
It is just a skin/wallpaper of GameBoy. Everything is a screen in the image.
No they don’t. What a rubbish clickbait article.
All they say is that there’s a (niche) trend of a few people using feature phones with expected combined sales of $2.8 million. Versus the $200 billions of iPhones alone.
I mean, the title is clickbaity, but what title isn’t at this point? The actual point of the article is just that there is a small but growing niche of younger people switching to feature phones. I think that’s neat, and I’m starting to consider a feature phone for my next phone myself.
Just because a lot of stuff is shitty doesn’t mean we should just a accept when things are shitty.
Yes, and pointing out that the title is clickbait is fine, but the entire post seems to be a disagreement with an article that agrees with the commenter. That seems to me to be a very unhealthy way of approaching the problem of clickbait titles.
Edit: I realized you’re not the original person I replied to.
Thanks. Exactly what I thought.
“tHe NuMbErS doN’t LiE”
“Numbers” are some paltry bs that are “expected to grow in 2023” like BTC was “expected to hit a $100k in 2020”.
They weren’t entirely wrong. The numbers don’t lie. They just don’t say what the author claims it does.
It’s directly in the headline: Gen Z is ditching the iPhone. That’s incorrect in two ways: A) it’s at best one in fifty people buying aforementioned feature phones and B) they don’t even know if all buyers replace their existing phone or buy it as an additional handset.
I have both a smartphone and a flip phone.
I kept both because the flip phone lets me make phone calls from my basement and many other places that the smartphone cannot.
I have never met anyone else with this setup.
Can you not use Wi-Fi Calling?
Yes, I could. But that allows the phone company to be lazy about coverage and building their network. The primary reason I pay a monthly cell phone bill is for a good network.
It also gets into security issues that are different from cellular network use.
And what if my internet is down and I have an emergency?
How often do you have an emergency that combines lost wifi and inability to leave the basement?
The older I get the more possible that becomes. I am not 20 and bulletproof any more.
I have never met anyone else with this setup.
That’s what I mean.
the flip phone lets me make phone calls from my basement and many other places that the smartphone cannot.
Why? The smartphone supports everything the flip phone does. Honest question.
I guess the radio is a bit more efficient
Doesn’t seem very likely to me given that cheap feature phones likely use cheap older parts while flagship smartphones state of the art components.
I don’t know what to tell you. If that’s his experience…
He didn’t say his flip phone was cheap
I had a biz partner who is a centimillionaire. He has an iPhone for data, and a flip-phone for calls.
I will now tell people I have a millionaire’s phone plan.
That’s still more than I expected. But it doesn’t look like the dramatic turn of tides.
I think it’s a fad. The moment you need a certain app or feature these feature (-less) phones become frustrating quickly.
Take the idea of taking a break from your smartphone on a vacation. You end up without a camera, without a map, without public transport apps, contact-free payment, etc.
I think you’d be surprised how easy it is to live without any of those things, even in the modern world. Also, feature phones have cameras and some basic apps. They’re not actually 80s cordless phones.
I wouldn’t be, because smart phones didn’t exist until I was in my 30s. No fucking way am I going back to paper maps and texting only through SMS with T9.
Okay. I’m not saying everyone should get a feature phone. I like paper maps though, and hate T9 less than I hate touchscreen keyboards.
Also, feature phones have cameras
I know the camera quality of this device category. They’re all crap, no exception. And even if you buy the best of the best it will cost you as much as a sophisticated smartphone that does everything better apart from maybe stand-by battery. Which is fine for an emergencyphone.
and some basic apps.
Mostly preinstalled because no app store, non-removable, and you never have to worry about missed updates because you won’t get any.
They’re not actually 80s cordless phones.
Agree, because they’re 2003 cordless phones and they suck for the everyday life of most people.
Okay. I didn’t say they’re good for most people. I don’t think they are. The cameras are good enough for me and the preinstalled apps usually include all the things I care about.
Also, why would I care about updates? Am I supposed to be afraid someone might hack my phone to steal my call history or something? The whole point is that it isn’t being used to log into every service on the face of the Earth.
Again, I’m not advocating for everyone to get a feature phone. I just think they do most of the things I use my phone for, and it would be pretty easy to just not do the rest. The fact that it’s not what most people want is not the same thing as it being terrible.
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