In November last year I popped my SIM card out of my smartphone, into a nano-to-micro SIM adaptor, and then slotted that into a Nokia 8110 4G. This has been my daily driver since then and I’ve found it to be a very comfortable experience and I have found myself to be happier day-to-day since making the switch.
My new setup is tailored very much to my needs and fits me perfectly but is not totally without friction and I have not entirely ditched my smartphone – I never intended to. My goal with this was to be able to turn my smartphone off while being contactable by friends and family for emergencies or conversations. I have comfortably achieved this goal.
The rest of this post goes into the details of my motivations, the setup, and my experiences of this change.
Table of Contents
Motivation
As stated, my main motivation was to be able to turn my smartphone off while remaining contactable by friends and family in the case of emergencies or just for chatting on the phone. A lot of digital ink has been spilled — by people much cleverer than I am — over the effect that smartphones have on people so I won’t go into this too much. Suffice it to say that I wasn’t happy with my relationship to my smartphone.
I have made a lot of changes to my digital life over the last decade such as removing myself from all social media and using an Un-Googled smartphone which doesn’t have many distracting apps on it. However I still found myself twitching and reaching for the device more often than I liked. This was largely because I like reading things on the web and my smartphone has a web browser in it, which is a recipe for distraction.
Over recent years, I’ve tried a few different tactics to address this twitch. At first I started putting my smartphone in a drawer when at home or in my bag when I’m on the move. This worked for a time but I would always just be able to reach in and grab it and get caught in the Web. The main triggers for this would be wanting information of some kind or when I used it to queue something to listen to on the move.
The next tactic I had in my arsenal was simply turning the smartphone off which provided a bit of friction between my twitch to reach for the device and the act of getting what I wanted. This approach also worked for a time but began to show its limitations when I’d miss actually-important messages or calls which lead to some negative consequences.
While I was struggling with this, others were writing articles or making videos about attempting to make the switch to a dumbphone or minimal phone and I started to think this might be the way to go for me. A dumbphone makes me contactable in an emergency while removing the stimulus of a smartphone. My main blocker was losing access to all of the genuinely useful things that a smartphone does while on the move; chiefly navigation, audio, and mobile banking.
This also seemed to be the blocker for people writing articles and making YouTube videos. They didn’t like not having access to various maps services or music streaming/podcast applications on the move, or having a decent camera which they could carry about in their pocket. I think they also missed out on having access to various messaging services such as WhatsApp or iMessage but that didn’t bother me at all.
I tossed and turned this over for a while because it felt like I was so close to where I wanted to be. My brain tried to fill in the gaps by looking at modern MP3 players, GPS devices etc. but these were non-starters. Most modern MP3 players are small Android devices which come bundled with Google services and that felt like a big step backwards to me. I’d almost given up on the idea when a thought occurred to me; did I actually need to ditch the smartphone to switch to a dumbphone?
I sat down and thought about it seriously and came to the conclusion that most of my problem stemmed from the fact that my smartphone had an always-available internet connection via my SIM card. Even turning the connection off via settings didn’t remove it and I could always just turn it back on again with a few swipes/taps. However; if I were to pop my SIM card out of my smartphone and into a dumbphone then I would be left with a useful device capable of playing local music/podcast files and being a decent calendar; but without the ability to endlessly distract me.
That left only one issue; mobile banking when on the move. For historic reasons, I only carry around small floats of “spending money” — usually enough to get something to eat/drink on the move — and whenever I want to make a larger purchase I transfer money from a savings account to pay for it. This serves as a moment of reflection for whether I really want something and when I was younger stopped me from spending my rent money on crisps, but it does require an internet connection and sometimes when we’re all out as a family there’s not enough in the float to pay for everyone’s lunch which means I need some way of transferring the money in situ.
However, there was hope. A little bit of research into contemporary dumbphones lead me to realise that there was a class of semi-dumb phone which suited my needs but could generate a Wi-Fi hotspot from the data connection of my SIM. I reckoned to myself that setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot on one device and then joining it on another was enough friction to stop me doing it every time I had a twitch to read something on Wikipedia, but not too onerous that I couldn’t do my mobile banking across the few times that I need it.
Choice of phone
I did a bit of research and landed on the Nokia 8110 4G because it had the features I want, they were going for a reasonable price second-hand on eBay, and I could easily swap out the stock ROM for a custom one without bloatware and spyware on it.
I was really apprehensive at first because a lot of this class of phone run an operating system called KaiOS, which is based on FirefoxOS. To the best of my knowledge despite being based on FirefoxOS it is proprietary and is mostly designed to provide internet services such as messaging and maps to low-end devices.
This means that KaiOS devices often contain Google services and Whatsapp! These are selling points for a lot of people but for me are things I would class an anti-features. In theory I could just ignore them and not use them, but I was worried about the phone leaking data to Google and Meta when I used the hotspot functionality.
A bit of quick research revealed the existence of the GerdaOS project and the BananaHackers community. It took me a while to wrap my head around the steps but I gathered from these resources that I could replace the stock KaiOS firmware with a bloatless and spywareless GerdaOS install and it wouldn’t be too different from flashing LineageOS on to a smartphone.
I have written a separate blog post about installing GerdaOS onto the Nokia 8110 4G:
Experiences
I’ve daily-driven this phone since November and I overall I have really enjoyed the experience. This section contains some grouped reflections on my ~5 months carrying a dumb-ish phone.
I was already half-prepared for this switch
In a lot of ways I was already mostly prepared for this switch. I’ve spent most of the last decade chipping away at things which had snared me and my attention. This started by ditching first Facebook and then all social media which lead to my experience of the web being based around link aggregators, RSS feeds, and personal websites. As noted I still had a twitch to go and check these things for new links and things to read, but I’ve had a life without social media notifications for nearly a decade now.
Not using some proprietary messaging services also helped me make this switch. I never used WhatsApp as it never solved a problem for me and by the time I ditched Facebook Messenger I had already moved all my regular conversations over to Signal, Telegram, and SMS. Generally people are still happy to SMS me if they don’t want to get Signal.
Using LineageOS on my device without the Google services or Micro-G since 2018 also meant that I’ve not relied on any proprietary apps or services other than for mobile banking. All of my apps are from F-Droid and are mostly practical and non-distracting. LineageOS also helped me prepare for this by not being perfect. It sometimes dropped my data connection so I was at least practiced at not having a connected device while on the move.
Playing music and audiobooks from local files meant I was never craving access to a streaming service. I’ve always loaded music files onto my smartphone’s local storage so if I’m on the move the device is far from useless. On the rare occasions I know I’ll be travelling a long way, I sometimes load entire movies onto the device for playback.
All of this together meant that my switch to a dumb-ish phone represented another step down a road I’ve been on for some time rather than a revolutionary change that’s flipped my life upside down. It is still a very positive change and one I’m very pleased that I’ve made but it’s a sort of calm joy that I’ve taken another step into a lifestyle that suits me rather than the sort of revelatory ecstatic joy one gets from a total paradigm shift.
Friction points
This change has not been without its friction points but they are ones I can live with. Having a young daughter means that the most obvious one is the lack of a camera to hand to capture random moments. This is doubly true on occasions I’ve left the house without the smartphone but it can be palpable inside the house as well. If my smartphone is turned off — and probably in a desk drawer — then it’s tough not to be able to capture a cute moment with my daughter in order to preserve or communicate it to my wife. The 8110 4G does have a camera but it’s not very good and I’ve only used it once to take a photo of my daughter to use as some wallpaper for the device rather than faff about with sideloading some images from my computer.
The other major friction point is typing on the keyboard. The 8110 4G has an alphanumeric 3x4 keypad which is not fun to type on if you’re coming from a world of QWERTY keyboards on smartphones. This has severely hampered my ability to sustain SMS conversations over time and means no digital notetaking on the device. I’m not too fussed about the latter as I have other means of taking notes but I still use SMS to converse with people.
I’ve managed to partially address this by trying to have more phone calls and only using SMS for sending very quick one-liners to transmit or respond to information. I do have, however, a few ongoing SMS conversations which require more thorough replies. For these I either have to carve out 5-10 minutes to respond or compose the message across an entire day. This is just the trade-off of my choice and overall I am happy to make it; but it does feel frustrating in the moment when my thumbs hurt.
Finally, I feel that I read far fewer interesting things. The twitches that distracted me would also often lead me to interesting articles or longreads which I do miss somewhat. I like learning about the world I live in and it was nice to have the ability to discover these things when I was on the train or the bus. However, this is another trade-off I’m happy with. I’m much more “in the moment” for most of the day, whatever that is supposed to mean. I’m more focused on what I’m doing and the muscles which make me pick up the smartphone for stimulation are atrophying nicely.
Surprising bonuses
There have also been some surprising bonuses for me making this switch. The first is that the charge in my smartphone lasts way longer these days due to the change in usage patterns.
On an average work day the smartphone lives in a desk drawer and then comes out later in the evening to act as a source of music while we cook in the kitchen or play/relax in the sitting room. I listen to an audiobook via the smartphone to help me sleep and when I work out I listen to podcasts. Most other uses are intermittent or not reliant on the smartphone itself; I have access to my email and messaging services via my computer while the dumbphone handles SMS and phone calls.
I’ve only needed to charge the smarthphone once every two or three days for the last few months. This usually occurs in the evening before I head to bed so that it’s got enough charge to see me through 90 mins of an audiobook and then can play podcasts and act as a stopwatch during my morning workout. The phone idles overnight once my audiobook sleep timer turns off the audio.
Another bonus is that I pay more attention to routes when I’m driving to try and remember them. I still use the smartphone for navigation to new places but if I know that I’m expected to drive somewhere multiple times in the future, I’ll pay attention to the specific turns as we go to try and ingrain them in memory with the goal of not needing the navigation aid for that specific route. I’ve enjoyed this and found I get a lot more out of driving than I used to.
Finally, a small positive side-effect of ditching the smartphone during the day is that I carry a pocket notebook and a pencil now. This emerged as a way to compensate for not having a notes app on a smartphone with which to take notes comfortably but is something I’ve really enjoyed.
Conclusion
I’ve swapped my daily driver phone to a the Nokia 8110 4G, a dumb-ish phone which has gained me the ability to turn my smartphone off during most of the day. I’ve kept the smartphone around for practical things which means that the trade-offs are fairly minimal and overall I am happier and am much less distracted.
I’d heartily recommend this model to anyone who doesn’t mind carrying around a dumbphone and relegating their smartphone to the status of little pocket computer.