A ‘boring phone’

The contradictory but predictable dynamics around communications and social media continue apace. A new gadget? Yes indeed.

The Boring Phone is a new, featureless flip phone that is feeding the growing appetites of younger people who want to bin their smartphones in favour of a dumbphone.

The latest model is a collaboration between Heineken beer and the fashion retailer Bodega, and caused a storm when it was unveiled this month at Milan design week, the place where trends are anointed by the world’s designers. The Boring Phone is part of a new dumbphone boom, built on the suspicion of gen Z towards the data- and attention-harvesting technologies they have grown up with. That suspicion has fuelled reinventions of retro cultural artefacts – a trend known as Newtro – and seen in the revival of vinyl records, cassettes, fanzines, 8-bit video games and old-fashioned mobile phones.

In truth this appears to be more publicity stunt than anything else. Private Eye noted that apparently Heineken is only making and distributing 5,000 of the devices. Moreover despite all the hoopla about disconnecting from the internet and marketing it also notes that to be in with a chance to get one you have to ‘give Heineken your name and email address’ and Heineken ‘may need to share Personal Data with third parties… and fist and third party advertising companies, media agencies for marketing purposes and of course ‘social media provides’. In others words if you want a Boring Phone you need to agree to be inundated by all the digital dross the Boring Phone promise to free you from’. 

While ‘dumb phone’ doesn’t have its own wiki page, ‘feature phone’ most certainly does:

A feature phone (also spelled featurephone) is a type or class of mobile phone that retains the form factor of earlier generations of mobile telephones, typically with press-button based inputs and a small non-touch display. They tend to use an embedded operating system with a small and simple graphical user interface, unlike large and complex mobile operating systems such as Android from Google or iOS from Apple.

The functions of feature phones are limited compared to smartphones, which integrate the phone with an Internet communications device; following the rise of smartphones, the feature phone has sometimes been referred to by the retronym dumbphone.^[1] However, some feature phones can provide functions found in smartphones, including Internet capabilities, apps and mobile games.

This article in the Guardian about how people are being asked to not take photographs at some classical concerts was interesting. I’m not sure I entirely buy the following:

The strict etiquette of the classical concert, like the opera and the ballet, has long been part of its essential atmosphere, its mystique. To experience this world for the first time is to be inducted into its codes and practices; in learning when to clap, what to wear, when not to distract everyone else, the newbie becomes the sophisticate. Times change, but the classical concert does not. Yet these sanctified institutions are now flinging all this aside to accommodate a culture that boringly suffices everywhere else. Why?

Some of those codes seem a bit arbitrary. Does classical music only ‘work’ when we wear certain clothes? I’m not sure it does. 

The compulsion on the part of some to take photographs or video throughout does raise the question as to what they’re actually seeing and hearing (and this is true of so many cultural or popular events). There was one excellent point:

It’s not the creep of phone culture that surprises: all hobbies and interests have gradually been subsumed into our main one – going on our phones. It’s that organisations such as the CBSO are embracing it.

The bit about the way mobiles have subsumed so many interests is very true.

It’s genuinely weird to see people nominally attending or experiencing one pursuit with their focus throughout on a mobile. It’s sort of the equivalent of pulling a book or newspaper out during a meeting. Sure, you can do it, but why? Why not divide up your time into areas where you focus more clearly on one thing at a time? I think it’s true as well that mobile usage seems to have a particular ability to creep into so many areas and dominate them, as a pastime in and of itself. Every Friday, if I’m working from home, I like to take a walk at lunchtime down to Marino. I’m struck by the ever-increasing numbers of people who are also walking and looking at mobiles. Given the dominance of screens – yeah, I know, I’m writing this on a computer, so the irony – you might think people would like to get away from them for a little.  

Small wonder people are looking at dumb phones and ‘feature phones’ and whatever. When your phone has an ability to do so many more things than you’re asking it to do and the feature bloat on so many phones makes them wildly over-capable and underutilised (really, who is going to use them to their fullest potential?), then there’s something out of balance. 

The big problem is that communication tech makes these simpler devices not entirely useful in a lot of contexts. For example, I WhatsApp close relatives abroad every week. Can’t do that on most feature phone. So what’s the alternative? Perhaps by limiting the range of uses the phone one has has. 

Piers Garrett, a 27-year-old tech sales executive, tried to achieve that balance by getting a Light Phone – a device that uses the same electronic ink used for e-readers and has no apps – but eventually gave up.

“The idea was amazing, but I only lasted six months,” he said. “Everyone communicates via WhatsApp. So now I have a happy medium. I’m very strict with my apps – just banking apps and train apps, and I turn off all my notifications. Now when I wake up in the morning, I do things for myself – have a coffee, read a book. And I noticed the change – so much more clarity in my mind.”

That halfway house makes sense.