So what’s the deal with smartphones? (canned laughter)

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I’ve always shunned smartphones. Well, since they existed, anyway, since it would be strange and difficult to shun something that hasn’t yet been invented.

There were always several reasons I avoided them. First, I’m one of the kind who keeps using or doing what has worked for me for a long time, and I lived at least three decades with landlines and only being reachable when I am at home. I resisted getting a cellular phone of any type until around 2006 or so, and that one was upgraded about 2 years later. That’s the one I’ve been carrying around and mostly doing nothing but repeatedly charging ever since. I don’t send or accept texts, and I have the ringer turned off unless I have arranged to accept a specific call in advance (usually when it’s time to rendezvous with someone out and about and I can’t use my home phone, for obvious reasons).

I’m also something of a contrarian. Rather than feel like I should get one because of the peer pressure, I go the opposite way. If I am supposed to have or do something, it creates in me the urge to not have or do that thing. The “you’re supposed to have one” thing pushed me to not have a smart phone for a long time. The more I saw cues that pointed to the expectation that every adult younger than the Baby Boomer generation would have one, the more it made me want to shun them.

I was conflicted about that. My opinion has always been that I should not be concerned about what others are thinking (not talking about going beyond the bounds of the social contract or anything like that… I don’t mean that I think it’s fun to go around deliberately insulting people or the like), but to do what works for me. It always bothered me how hippies and other similar subcultures thought of themselves as nonconformists. They all dressed similarly, talked similarly, had similar views and opinions. They were all non-conforming, together, in the same way as everyone else in their peer group.

Similarly, I had a friend who was also friends with several people in the “punk” subculture during the 80s. He was not unfamiliar with that group… he’d dabbled around the edges of it, but never been a full carded member of the “scene.”

One day they invited him to some kind of a club or party, which he accepted… only to find that strangers would take it upon themselves to criticize him for wearing a dark blue shirt and not a black one. He had black pants and jacket, but that wasn’t enough. These were the “nonconformists” of the era, the then-modern descendants of the hippies, getting on someone’s case for being out of uniform.

If it sounds like something other than “punk,” well, all I know is what they called themselves, and that was it.

Like the hippies in years past, they were, in fact, conformists, just with a different idea of which norm they should be conforming to. That’s not nonconformity… it’s inverse conformity. And I, as a reflexive contrarian, was sort of falling into that line of thinking.

I think doing something because everyone expects you to is dumb, but if that’s the case, isn’t it just as dumb to not do something because everyone expects you to? I’m still letting my actions be guided by other people’s opinions if I do.

The other arguments against smartphones were that I dislike Apple and Google both. I do not like Apple’s walled-garden, “you’re holding it wrong,” anti-repair stance, and Google wants to collect enough information about me to write an unauthorized biography. Neither works for me, and there are not many other choices. There are Purism and Pinephone, but they’re even more niche than desktop Linux.

There’s no denying that these fondleslabs have a lot of utility. I never needed that growing up… many many people lived before the things existed, and they managed. But that doesn’t mean there’s no benefit in it, only that I could get by, which is a much lower standard.

This whole COVID thing has gotten me to embrace various forms of curbside pickup. Many of these require network connectivity to signal to the store that the individual is present and ready to receive the item. In some cases, the same store that has the pickup option also has in-store wifi that I can pick up out in the parking lot, and I can use that to signal my presence, and that’s worked several times, but there is no guarantee.

My old phone from c.2008 is also not going to be usable forever. The networks are phasing out 2 and 3g, and its time will come soon. I used to be on Virgin Mobile, which was later fully acquired by Sprint (rather than just being a virtual carrier that contracted with Sprint to use their network), and when T-Mobile absorbed Sprint, they had to divest of Virgin and Boost to get the US government to accept the deal. They sold Virgin and Boost to Dish Network, which quickly eliminated Virgin and folded it into Boost.

The existing deal I had with Virgin was antiquated but cheap… a $20 “top up” would buy three months of service, for a total of $6.67 per month, and airtime cost 25 cents a minute for the first ten of the day, and 10 cents a minute after that. For someone who used the phone a lot, it would quickly cost major money, but for one who used it almost not at all like me, it was a working phone to call 911 or a tow truck if needed when I was out and about (of course, no service is needed to call 911). The balance would build month after month as I kept buying more time and never using it (and I would periodically burn it off when my local telco’s very unreliable land line service would fail. Not much maintenance going on with POTS lines these days).

Boost’s deal after they acquired my account wasn’t as good as the one I had when it was Virgin, adding a $5 a month charge just for the privilege of having the account (thus using up most of my $6.67 monthly allotment), and I never had any data on that plan.

So I went looking for a new non-smart phone, and found a new 4g LTE flip phone available from several networks, and its most important feature was the ability to create a mobile hotspot with which I could gain connectivity for my laptop anywhere. It seemed like the perfect compromise… I could keep avoiding smartphones, and I would gain the ability to use my laptop with the net anywhere.

I compared all of the plans, and I found one I really liked with another carrier. It allowed 25 GB of data per month, all of it usable with tethering. I had no intention of trying to browse with a non-touch flip phone with a 3″ display!

I got the new flip phone home and began to play with it, and I found the carrier had disabled the wifi hotspot feature, even though the plan shown in the phone’s listing on the web showed “25GB + mobile hotspot,” and I knew the phone had that feature.

The phone still has wired tethering, but that isn’t as good. I was going to carry the phone anyway, and I often have my Swift with me, so with the mobile hotspot, it’s all the same except that I can connect anywhere. Now I would have to carry a cord too, and to deal with its inconvenience when in use.

I’d had to activate the phone in-store to get the deal I did (it was not listed as one of the “bring your own phone” SIM-only plans), but now I had it, and that meant I also had the sim card. I could then buy any unlocked GSM phone that was LTE capable and use it… but there was no unlocked, generic version of my flip phone. The ones from other carriers were network locked, and the only one whose manual specifically mentioned how to turn on mobile hotspot was from a carrier that wanted $100 for the same phone I got for less than half of that, and it would be locked to that network. They would want me to have service for a while before allowing me to unlock it officially, and those unlocking sites… I don’t know that I can trust them. I have to submit the IMEI to them to get my unlock code, and I don’t want to hand that to untrusted sites.

Of course, I knew that smart phones had the ability to create a mobile hot spot or to use bluetooth tethering, and I really wanted that feature. But… ugh, one of THOSE?

Google being able to track me was a major turn-off. I read several guides about preventing the tracking, or at least undoing it, and they were about turning off location services on the phone and logging in to Google and deleting the reported data they’d collected. I don’t trust that, though; I just don’t think that a company based on surveillance capitalism like Google is really going to delete what they have on me. I’d assume they were merely deleting the visual record of that data’s existence, while the actual stuff would remain. Similarly, I don’t trust that simply finding the things that I have the option to turn off (and turning them off) necessarily means that it’s really off… only that the levers there designed to keep me from looking at the man behind the curtain are doing their job.

I thought again about the likes of Pinephone, but… I don’t know. But what about an Android phone with AOSP or one of its derivatives, like LineageOS, the successor to CyanogenMod?

The relationship between AOSP and Android is just like the one between Chromium and Chrome. The bulk of each is open-source code developed by Google, with a bit of proprietary stuff on top. In the case of Android, the stuff on top is responsible for a lot of the utility that people are accustomed to, and that’s also where the spying comes in. It’s not in the open bits for which anyone can read the source code. It’s in the proprietary blobs, where it can remain somewhat hidden. Keeping that spying stuff present and enabled is the cost for using those Google apps and services that many people consider indispensable. Google’s worked it so that the cost of using AOSP without the Google Apps (“GApps”) is too high for many people. The center of the hub appears to be Google Play Services, without which few (if any) of the Google Apps will work, and which is the main spyware too. Many third-party apps also depend on Google Play, and will not work properly, or at all, without it.

There used to be an aftermarket version of Android based on AOSP called CyanogenMod, but it was discontinued by its author several years ago. It was continued by the community as LineageOS.

The good news about a phone supported by LineageOS is that it is likely to keep being supported by LineageOS for as long as that model of phone is in common use, so the short update life of a phone can be extended, much in the way that the short update life of a router can be with OpenWRT or DD-WRT. That kills two of the objections to phones, if done properly… the spying is out, and the ability to keep up to date is extended. And with me increasingly questioning my own objection to phones because of my own contrary nature, well…

I looked at various phone models that were supported by LineageOS, and found one that is cheap, readily available, and where unlocking the bootloader was easy… the Motorola G7 Play. It’s on Amazon for $130, carrier unlocked, and Motorola will give you the unlock code for the bootloader… at a cost of the warranty. I looked into that, and the Motorola rep had said that things that can’t be the result of the messing around with the OS are still covered, and that was all I was worried about.

I could have gotten the G7 cheaper if I got the carrier locked version, but I did not know if Motorola would issue the unlock code for the bootloader. I bit the bullet and paid a bit more for the unlocked one, which I knew would be unlockable.

So I bought one, and before I even had it a few hours, its ostensible warranty was already gone, to whatever extent it was. I put the SIM card from the flip phone into the G7, and it worked as expected.

So how does the phone work without Google Play? That’s how most people get their apps, and while there are sites out there like apkmirror.com that offer a lot of apps, they don’t have them all. That site and apkpure.com are regarded as being trustworthy, but there are a lot more that may or may not be, so you have to be cautious. There’s no list of crypto hashes of the various apps available from Google, as Google’s interest is in forcing people to use Play.

I first installed the F-droid repository app, through sideloading. That is a third-party Android app store whose offerings are all open source. From there, I installed Aurora, a third party Google Play store that allows one to download and install apps right from Google Play, but without Google Play Services or even having to sign in. It offers to use an anonymous sign-in, which worked fine for me, and I was able to download and install all kinds of things without Play.

It should be noted that if you want the actual Play, you can get that (and all the other Google Apps, or GApps) by installing the OpenGApps package of your choice at the time you’re installing LineageOS from the recovery mode. You’re just bringing back the spying, though, if you do.

I tried it with some of those at first, but I wasn’t happy with it, and I ended up doing a fresh installation completely free of GApps. So there’s no Google Maps, Street View, Calendar Sync, Contacts sync, GMail, or any of the other stuff so many people would give up all of their personal data to keep using. I don’t need those things in app form… I have a PC (several!) that can do Google Maps and Street View better than any tiny-screened phone, and now that I have the ability to use wifi or Bluetooth tethering, that’s not a problem wherever I am. I do, of course, still have a browser on the phone that can use the web versions of the Google services.

A lot of non-Google apps also fall flat. Trying to start them results in noisy complaint notifications that say I must enable Google Play for it to work. Those apps get summarily removed.

I can see where a lot of people would not want to do this. For me, it’s a small price to pay for the privacy. Lots of apps DO work, including the one from my bank. The one from my car/home insurance company fails miserably, though, so away it goes… but I can use the browser for that. I found an open source Youtube app on F-droid that works as well as the official one, though I was surprised to see that the in-browser video performance was also quite decent on Opera mobile, which is thus far the only decent web browser I have seen for Android. Opera was also the best when I used my Android tablet 8 years ago, only then the decent one was the original “Presto” Opera). Text reflow on zoom is IMO a must on small screens, and most browsers lack that feature (as they did 8 years ago too).

So, after using a smartphone for a few days (I had never even held one until less than a week ago, if you can believe it!)… I cannot see any way how people think phones are a reasonable substitute for a PC for browsing. To call it a poor substitute doesn’t even begin to describe it. I knew it would be that way, as even with my tablet that I used years ago, the small screen made the simplest tasks far more annoying, and I would always use a real computer rather than the tablet if I had access to both.

I still will not use any social media apps (or the sites themselves) or communicate via text. I guess I am part of that “older” generation who still considers the voice call to be the “real” way to communicate with someone in real time.

Installing social media apps on my de-Googled phone would just bring back the spying I am trying to avoid, and I have no interest in them anyway. I’ve seen a bunch of things about how destructive smartphones are, and all these people who go out on stage in TED talks and the like, giving speeches about how they use a flip phone as if they are relating some kind of weird, arcane, retro thing. Maybe for some, but for me, the point of reference was the land line, so even a basic feature phone is the future.

With those people who suffer the same symptoms as drug addicts at the metaphoric hands of the smartphone, it strikes me that it’s not the phone itself that is the issue, but the combination of always-available connectivity, social media, and notifications. I am not aware of any social media addiction stories back in the MySpace era, when everyone knew that any interaction they had with a person’s “space” would not be seen by that person until they came home from school or work and sat down at the PC with the intent of doing just that.

With smartphones, there’s an expectation of immediacy. When you interact with someone’s Facebook profile (just using this as an example… I know the cool kids have moved on!), it sends a notification to that person immediately, and the person who did the thing expects that they have their phone with them (a reasonable thought) and that they have notifications on (also a reasonable thought), and therefore they will know instantly that there’s something waiting for them. Similarly, when you update that Facebook page, it creates a notification for all of your “Friends,” and you expect that within a few minutes, they’ve all seen what you posted.

The immediacy creates a constant mental state of being on call for social media, with no “me” time that used to be a commonplace thing within human life when one was incommunicado by necessity.

Social media are designed by their creators to be addictive. People come to rely on that little dopamine hit when someone “likes” their post or otherwise validates them, and it creates that all too familiar situation where young people can’t stay off their phones for more than a few minutes. After that, they start jonesin’ for another dopamine hit.

It wasn’t social media alone that did this, nor was it the smartphone. It was the combination of both!

As for me, I intend to remain as generally unreachable as ever now that I have this thing. Email, in all of its non-immediate glory, is still the preferred method. I still use my landline as the phone of record. I still have no interest in texting, and I already covered the social media. I don’t even answer my land line if I have no interest in talking to the person indicated on the caller ID, and I won’t answer the door if I don’t want to. No one has a right to my time; they get my attention at my leisure. I’m an introvert (though I am not at all shy, which people often confuse with introversion), so my alone time (and that means being free of all social interactions by all means!) is important to me, and I will defend it.

I’m sitting here writing this on my 15.6″ screened Dell G3 laptop. The new phone is here too, but I’m using the best tool for the job. A phone is great when maximum mobility is the main concern, but any other time, it’s vastly inferior to a PC, whether laptop or desktop. My tablet never even came close to dislodging the PC from the top spot in my computing regimen, and this thing is even less convenient to use than that. More convenient to put in a pocket and carry, though, which will be its primary role.

I predict that in several months’ time, most people I encounter in person regularly still won’t know I have a smartphone. It will mostly be a less convenient to carry version of the flip phone (because of its size). And when my DSL conks out (and it will, I am sure, as it has dozens of times in the past few years), I have a backup.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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ClearThunder

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I use my phone as a flashlight and a magnifying glass (take a picture and zoom in so I can see the small print) I think I have made 2 phone calls and received 3 in about 5 years. I have the ringer turned all the way down.

Yes, I am old school, I have a landline. Amazing how many people get upset that I don’t respond to their texts

I do occasionally send family texts. I have used the tethering feature which allowed me to cancel one of my backup ISP accounts.

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I’m not against new technology per se, but I’m afraid the whole smartphone era has utterly passed me by. I do have a phone, for emergencies, or for the occasional bit of txting (although, with my big fat sausage fingers, it is very occasional), but, mwah, if I want to have a conversation with someone I’ll use email, or just talk to them face-to-face (not so much of that at the minute though)

In my book, the whole thing is one gigantic scam, locking people into a perpetual meaningless upgrade cycle (Wow! this new generation features a trillion mega giga pixel camera! In a phone! To take selfies with!). It beats me how people are so daft that they’ve been taken in by it all, but I suppose it’s like any addiction, once you’re hooked, you’re hooked

(Me, I’ll stick to crack cocaine and a nice cup of tea, thank you very much)

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NaNoNyMouse wrote:

In my book, the whole thing is one gigantic scam, locking people into a perpetual meaningless upgrade cycle…

Indeed! The expected replacement cycle on these things is so short that two years of version + security upgrades and one more year of security only upgrades is considered outstanding. At the same time, the $1000 mark for a phone was just smashed by one of the iPhones not long ago, and now the top models are well over that. For a disposable device that will only get support for a few years!

Three years would have been much better than what I got with that tablet (Galaxy Tab 2 7″). It received its second and final update before the one year warranty ran out! That was why something like LineageOS appeals to me. Motorola G7 phones are cheap and well-built, and the easy unlocking offered by Motorola means a lot of people like me buy them when they want to use aftermarket OSes. That means a lot of us will probably be using them for a long time, which makes it likely they’ll keep building for those models. There are no guarantees in life, of course, but it’s a better bet than I had before.

I won’t be upgrading all the time to keep up with the latest specs. The G7 Play is an underspec phone already by modern standards, with only 2GB of RAM and a less than full HD display. It’s fine… it’s enough to run a mobile hot spot and make calls, and I can use the occasional app directly on it if I need to. The only use case I can think of right off the bat would be depositing checks with the camera (if I should happen to receive one… it doesn’t happen much anymore), something I used to be able to do with my scanner until about a year or so ago, when my bank decided to drop that service rather than modernize the Java applet the site used to do what it needed to (and I really am not sure what else would be able to do that). As long as I have internet, my PCs can do everything I need, and my Swift is usually with me anyway.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Ascaris wrote:

Indeed! The expected replacement cycle on these things is so short that two years of version + security upgrades and one more year of security only upgrades is considered outstanding.

Yeah, that.

There’s a few manufacturers who make Android/AOSP-based phones with a longer service life, but you’ll usually have to pay a premium for that.

My current phone is a factory Android, still getting monthly updates and at least the battery is user-replaceable… and to my disappointment there still isn’t a LineageOS port.

I suppose I could try building AOSP all on my own with just the vendor’s hardware-specific blob (yes, that is available) but… hm, maybe I should’ve bought two, just so I’d have a second one for testing.

(I do sometimes wonder if it’d be feasible to just by phones in batches for the whole family and then do AOSP/whatever builds for that…)

Most of the “basic” functionality (including the map/navigation apps I usually use, and messaging) comes from either AOSP base or F-Droid anyway.

The major bother is that too many of the non-basic apps that are the main reason to use a smartphone tend to depend on Google Services(tm). And I mean the bank apps, government bureaucracy apps, post office app… official national COVID-19 tracker app…

Now, I started using smartphones because my then-employer told me to, but the reason why I originally got one for the spouse? Dyslexia-or-something, shopping lists and MMS billing – slow plain ‘net data was a lot cheaper than non-“smart” MMS from a camera-equipped featurephone.

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I know what you are talking about! I really don’t want to use a smartphone myself, neither do I have a need of one. I would love to keep the dumb phone I have now but as you said, it will be phased out soon I only use it occasionaly simply to keep in contact with my family. I do use texts but that is because I am deaf, so it is not like I could simply use the voiced call but like you I have a zero interest in social media. I also loath the smartphone culture, especially about the effect it has on the computers and society in whole.

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Ascaris wrote:

At the same time, the $1000 mark for a phone was just smashed by one of the iPhones not long ago, and now the top models are well over that.

Yup and the new Samsung flip is $1500. My GF who wanted a flip kept finding it advertised. I explained it was a smart phone and would have all the same kind of features as my phone that she does not want to deal with. The flip from net10 that she ended up with is annoying to both of us a good flip is hard to find. When Tropical Storm Isaias dropped a tree that killed internet and tv for a week I was able to use my phone on the ATT network via Straight Talk to tether for a week. Eventually it was revealed that tethering was not allowed on ATT via ST.

@ Ascaris
You seem to have done very well in a short time. I was finally forced off copper this week and maybe choosing between cable or fios for ISP/TV/Phone. Copper was the only reason that I still have both. Finding out what you actually get (like tethering) with these companies is always a chore.

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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I used to like the old “brick” phones. They felt OK in your hand up to your ear, the sound was good and it worked like a phone. You could stick it in your back pocket, if it fell, it usually didn’t break and could also be used for light hammering tasks without any ill effects.

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Ascaris wrote:

I’ve always shunned smartphones. …
… I kept buying more time and never using it (and I would periodically burn it off when my local telco’s very unreliable land line service would fail. Not much maintenance going on with POTS lines these days).
… I’m an introvert …, so my alone time … is important to me, and I will defend it.

Bravo! (and NO laughter, canned or otherwise)

No smartphone here either. In fact, not even cellular. Just a landline (voice over fiber, more on that later) connected to an answering machine set to 6 rings and ALL the ringers in the house turned off. Anyone who calls me knows to wait for the answering machine and identify themselves before anyone picks up a phone here. Nearly all telemarketers hang up before the sixth ring and the robocalls that are patient enough to wait get to leave a message that is immediately deleted. I have considered getting a non-smart/flip phone for use in emergencies but whether flip or smart, the driving factor is utility measured against economy and certainly not by what everyone else is doing. The usefulness of the device has to be worth the cost (and for the record, there is no cable TV in the house — I watch free broadcast TV over an antenna I built from watching a YouTube video).

As far as POTS goes (and this also is for wavy, who has been forced off copper and thinking of cable or Fios for phone service), be aware that if the phone company can install Fios to your home, then you also have the ability to choose voice over fiber. Now keep in mind that voice over fiber is NOT the same as Fios. Not exactly anyway. If you take Fios and remove the Internet and TV from it, you have voice over fiber but not at the hefty cost of Fios. When my copper landline became unusable from the all the noise and static and dropped calls, I was able to switch to voice over fiber. Because the local phone company was so hot to get me off copper, they did the switch over, installing all the required equipment at no charge and my phone bill looked exactly the same before and after the switch. The unspoken bonus was that I now have all the equipment installed if I ever do decide to go to Fios (I guess all I’d have to pay for is the installation of the Ethernet from the ONT to wherever the modem would be placed inside).

Finally, an off-topic item. Every card-carrying introvert owes it to himself to read Sophia Dembling’s book The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World. It opened my eyes wide to all the things I thought marked me as an outsider when, in fact, about half the world’s population is the same way — we’re called introverts.

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Remarkable how almost exactly Ascaris has described, on writing about his, my own attitude to cellphones of any kind. I still have and use preferably a landline with a sleek princess receiver. I have a new, if retro, clamshell that use only, same as Ascaris, to make calls in some very special situations where I must make them in some place other than  home.

Unfortunately, without asking for it, as I am quite happy with the present day 4G connections, or even 3G, if it were still around here, the apparently unstoppable coming of 5G means that my next cell phone probably will be a smart one. I hope there are less “advanced” 5G alternatives I can still use, but maybe not.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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The local telco stopped offering landlines here a few years ago and disconnected everything they had remaining soon after.

The landline number is a VoIP phone now. Currently a software phone but there’s a company that sells tone-dial analog telephone adapters for VoIP.

They didn’t have a pulse-dial ATA, I did ask… so we’d have had to get a new phone for that anyway. (Was a cheese-body Ericsson. As in made of casein polymer, Galalith/Erinoid/Aladdinite/whatever other trade names…)

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All my communications are through fiber optic cables: TV, Internet and the landline phone. So, while the copper wires were removed or ceased to be maintained by Verizon, depending of where one’s house was situated, there is something like the old landline still working. I write “something like”, because fiber optics does not conduct electricity, so the phone does not get the power it needs to work from the local exchange anymore. Instead, it gets current from the termination box sitting on a shelf in a closet of my apartment. So when a bad storm causes a blackout, after some hours on a battery, also in that box, my landline goes dead. Then my cellphone earns his rather way too expensive pay, until the lights come back in.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Yeah, if they offered fiber to my house on reasonable terms, I’d probably take it… but not prepared to pay a tens of thousands in € for that.

Rural folks get subsidies for that, but this is a city.

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mn- “but not prepared to pay a tens of thousands in € for that.”

Is fiber optics connection really that expensive where you live? Here in the USA it is generally considered to be too expensive, but even so I only pay for TV, Internet and the phone some $1900 a year, that is even less than that in €.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Well, plenty of cable trench to dig, across streets and other people’s yards and… lots of bureaucracy involved. Would mostly be a one-time expense.

Also the phone company really doesn’t want to.

Apparently everyone else is happy with mobile broadband. Or not unhappy enough to actually demand better service, at least.

Mobile broadband costs have been going up too, it’s now something like 25 €/month for unmetered nominal 200 Mbps… but still.

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I live in the US, and I don’t know if I would be able to get “last mile” fiber at any price. If I did, it would probably involve me paying to lay the fiber cable, as mn- alluded to.

I didn’t know POTS was being removed elsewhere before reading it here (not in this thread though)… it’s unthinkable to me, on par with the electric company no longer offering connections to the electrical grid. It’s what they’re for! 

More and more, I find myself like Squidward in that one Spongebob episode…”Fuuuuture! Fuuuuture!”

 

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OK, the cost is in laying down the lines. Here in my neighborhood, as I understand it, the fiber optics lines have been lied down along the same underground pipes, etc. where the old copper wires were, so the amount of work was not that extensive. Also the one time cost to be connected to the fiber lines was not much. But this is an urban area, and in the countryside the situation might be a different one and those telephone copper conduits might not be reusable as fiber ones? Besides the telephone company not wanting to bother doing that replacement, as mn- has pointed out.

I’ve noticed that, at least in the UK major cities, using only over the air cellphone connections is pretty much the way the telephone system works. I’ve got the impression, perhaps incorrect, but that’s what I’ve got, that everyone there is pretty much assumed to have on them and use a cellphone for just about everything during their waking hours. I was in London some years ago, visiting people at the University College London and was lodging at a hotel nearby where, to my great surprise, there were no telephone connections in any room. The receptionist was flabbergasted when I asked to use the office phone to let people waiting for me know that, because an unexpected minor problem I was going to be a little late for a meeting.

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It seems that’s the way everything is going in the US too. There used to be pay phones everywhere… nowadays I think you’d find the kidlets holding the handset, staring at it while wondering how one sends a text or uses Whatsapp on it.

I don’t stay in many hotels, and if I do, it’s more likely to be a Motel, but the last time I did (about 2 years ago), there was a phone in the room. It’s been only the very lowest end lodging I’ve seen that had no phones in rooms… I was in one motel in about 1990 where the rooms had no phones. The TV had a coat hanger for an antenna, and it blew up before morning arrived (all the magic smoke came out). The door lock would not work without messing with it, and the ceiling tiles indicated a leaky roof (fortunately it was not raining). On the good side, there were no visible signs of any six-legged guests.

That’s the level of quality I would associate with a phoneless room.

Even if guests have their own phones, the in-room phone is a quick means of communicating with hotel staff, and having that hotel staff know instantly that you’re a guest in the hotel, and in which room. I’d rather press a given button and instantly get room service (not that they’d have that in the kinds of places I’d pay for) than to have to faff about with phone numbers, and without a certain way to link the order to the room number, I’d bet they’d want payment up front instead of letting me charge it to the room. I’d even have to remember my own room number, which in my case means I’d have to go walk out to the hall and look at the door.

I’m too lazy to do all that! If I don’t have to, anyway, and making things easy on the guests is supposed to be what the hospitality industry is about. They will have greatly increased the level of effort it takes to do things that used to be dead simple. If the room costs less than a meal across the street at Burger King, I can see it, but at any kind of a place that has a star rating, it would be a negative for me, even if I have my own phone. I have my own bed too… do they expect me to bring that and use it also?

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OscarCP wrote:

I was in London some years ago, visiting people at the University College London and was lodging at a hotel nearby where, to my great surprise, there were no telephone connections in any room. The receptionist was flabbergasted when I asked to use the office phone to let people waiting for me know that, because an unexpected minor problem I was going to be a little late for a meeting.

It’s hard to feel sorry about the death of the in-room phone.  Hotels put a phone in the room, then charged eye-watering markups on phone calls – and I mean eye-watering.  No-one used them, used their cellphones instead.  Then they tried charging eye-watering markups for wi-fi.  People like me discovered the tethering features of their cellphones.  And now, hotel room wi-fi is – mostly – free of charge.

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ScotchJohn: “Hotels put a phone in the room, then charged eye-watering markups on phone calls – and I mean eye-watering.”

True, but not true enough. People traveling on business can be reimbursed when they submit the hotel bills, that do include the telephone charges.

People with cellphones on them, particularly those not traveling on business and, or unlikely to get their expenses reimbursed  can use their phones, if they need to make long outside phone calls.

People without cellphones traveling for other reasons than business can keep their outside calls few, short and sweet: I have been doing that for years when traveling on my own personal business or just for fun, and has worked a treat.

In the less likely case where one has a real need to make a possibly urgent longer call, or a number of such calls when they are not refundable: that is what money is for.

Finally, Ascaris has already explained quite clearly the convenience of having a telephone in one’s hotel room for internal communication with the front desk, room service, etc.

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Are you taking roaming charges into account here? (Yes, they still exist in parts of the world)

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I’ve read about people who travel to different countries going out and buying a SIM card from a local carrier to become a “local” in terms of the cell service while in that other country.

Most phones that are offered by the various carriers (in the US at least) are “locked” and won’t accept SIM cards from other carriers, though, and the carriers will only tell you the unlocking code once you have had service for a set amount of time. These phones are often offered at a discount, as the cost of the phone is subsidized by the carrier (who knows they will be getting the money for the airtime plan). They want to make sure they’ve gotten their money’s worth out of the subsidy before letting it be unlocked.

It used to be also that phones from US carriers that used CDMA (Verizon, Sprint) would not work on GSM networks, including those in use by AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, as well as by the rest of the world outside of the US. CDMA-only phones like my old feature phone didn’t even have SIM cards of which to speak.

It’s my understanding, though, that this doesn’t apply to 4G LTE. The 2G and 3G networks are being phased out in favor of 4G LTE and now 5G, and 4G LTE uses SIM cards and is the new world standard, and is independent of the old GSM vs. CDMA thing. There’s still the bit about different carriers using different LTE channels, and some devices may in theory not work with some channels, but I don’t know how prevalent that is in real life.

 

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I was in Australia for a meeting there back in 2016, and my cellphone was  (and still is) AT&T’s 4G. It worked there just fine, because the local cell grid was also 4G in Sydney. I did have to call first AT&T to let them know I was going to be using it in Australia between such and such dates, so my local calls would go through there.

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Most phones that are offered by the various carriers (in the US at least) are “locked” and won’t accept SIM cards from other carriers

It not that way anymore in Europe. Simply buy a cell phone at the store, which is focused on all cell phones. Not just reseller of any “service provider” – O2, vodafone, …

Also I have new type of internet connection now in my cabin (hut). Its data SIM card with TPLink Archer router. And I can get internet wherever I want to (there must be an electricity of course).
I can take this “internet” everywhere, its so nice

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Had a report that standing in Italy, getting charged roaming as if the phone was on the other side of the lake… in Switzerland. A very pricey day trip, without crossing any borders

There have been changes in the last couple of years, thankfully.

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Yeah, radio waves don’t have much respect for national borders…

Another funny thing though – if you want maximum coverage within any given country in Europe, it may be worthwhile to get the SIM from another country.

Because if there are several carriers within a country, they might not allow cross-roaming between carriers. But they all probably have international roaming… so, a foreign SIM will work with all of them.

Hunters may do that with dog-tracker collars for example. (Small antenna, close to ground, rural… low data volume usually)

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Yeah, radio waves don’t have much respect for national borders…

Thats correct. For exmaple if I go to mountain Jested (1012m) here in Liberec, my telephone says:
“Wilkommen in Deutschland”
And Germany is like 50-60 kilometers away. Radio vawes do not respect national borders !

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[OscarCP]

No, Kirsty, because I am discussing telephones installed in hotel rooms to make outside calls, as well as inside ones to the front desk, etc. But maybe those preferring their cellphones over those room phones might have to consider roaming charges?

Hmmm … maybe you are answering to ScottJohn. If so, please, ignore me.

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• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by OscarCP.

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OscarCP wrote:

People with cellphones on them, particularly those not traveling on business and, or unlikely to get their expenses reimbursed  can use their phones, if they need to make long outside phone calls.

No Oscar, not reply to ScotchJohn

I was just adding another point to the discussion…

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? says:

Ascaris, nice work on the g7. i got the moto e6 last dec. 26th when the lg flip gave up the ghost after 10 or 11 years of happy conversations, e-mails and low megapixel photos. the e6 has all the google play stuff on it and i had to make a gmail in order to get it to ring. the phone also gets around 1.5gb worth of patches through the store every month, and it still tries to talk to me after disabling everything i could find to shut it up. i just got another 500mb PCBS yesterday the second one in as many months. with your custom setup how do you get security patches?

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Ascaris

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anonymous wrote:

with your custom setup how do you get security patches?

They come over the air like the stock patches. I already received one since I put the custom ROM on there.

I do remember I had to set a preference somewhere to turn on incoming calls. I thought that was rather weird… it’s a phone, and it can’t receive calls by default?

I was a little surprised at how much extra effort it takes to use the phone as an actual phone. The bit about unlocking it when I pick it up is obvious, something I never had with my feature phone, but then when I dialed one of those automated attendant things, it asked me to press a number, so when I pulled the phone away from my face to see the touchscreen so I could do that, I saw the keypad was gone, and while I figured out how to get it back, I couldn’t hear that it gave up on waiting for me to press a button and started recording a message, which I could not hear because the phone was in my hand and not by my ear, so when I found the “re-enable the keypad’ button and put the phone back up to my ear, I heard nothing, and thought a person may be there, so I said “Hello,” and then it said “To rerecord your message, press (something),” and I didn’t want to leave a message, so I reflexively hit the power button to end the call, which instead locked the screen while the call was still going, so I had to unlock it once again, and by the time I did, it had already sent my message of fumbling around and saying “hello” like an idiot.

Putting LineageOS on there, with and then without GApps (and rooted) is no problem, but actually using the thing? I’m a stereotype!

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OscarCP wrote:

True, but not true enough. People traveling on business can be reimbursed when they submit the hotel bills, that do include the telephone charges.

Oscar – you make gouging corporate hotel guests sound like a victimless crime.

But, yes, I would miss having a phone in my room to call the front desk or other hotel functions.

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Of the many unfair and abusive things inflicted by greedy people on those of us that have no way of escaping them, this is one of the least worrisome to me. But, when it comes to internal communication with the staff, or receiving incoming calls, or hearing messages people has left for me, all at no extra cost, I think that not providing phones in hotel rooms is one more way of taking the adoration of all that is repeatedly declared to be “new and improved” way too far.

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When my carrier finally turned off my old “bar of soap” phone I reluctantly got an iPhone XR. I hate it. I have removed every “app” Apple lets me take off. There are still too many left on it.

As an old guy that remembers when phones came one to a house, on the kitchen wall (and life was fine then) I can’t see a purpose for a phone other than talking. I don’t need or want some wonder gadget that I have to buy in order to report on myself to the government.

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There are feature phones that are usable with the newer networks (4G LTE). I bought one only a week or so before I got the G7! It’s the Alcatel Smartflip (it goes by different names by different carriers, though, so it may be called some other variation of “flip,” but there is no carrier-unlocked versuon of which I am aware). It’s not truly a “dumb” phone (it uses KaiOS, the continuation of the abandoned FirefoxOS), but is more like a hybrid feature/smartphone. Its UI, though, is almost exactly like that of my old-generation feature phone from more than a decade ago, and is far less complex than a smartphone if all you want to use it for is typical feature phone stuff. Trying to use it for browsing is a form of torture that surely is covered by international law.

That modern flip phone was the gateway phone into the smartphone fray that I’ve avoided prior to that, since I did want a bit more than the basic capability my old feature phone had. Had the carrier not disabled the wifi hotspot capability (even though my plan allows for it), I nearly certainly would not have made the move. I do enjoy things like changing operating systems and getting things configured and learning how all of that works, though, and that was probably the final bit that tipped the balance in favor of the G7. Yeah, this is the kind of thing I do for fun!

 

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? says:

yes, having been used by this cartoonesque excuse for a mobile telephone for almost a year. i feel as if i have been internationally tortured. this e6 refused to do anything before being connected to the bowles of the mothership s.s. google. it shows remarkable apptitude for dropping calls, and muting calls at will and i have to put it on speaker to make out what the person keeps trying to say over and over. when i grasp it at the bottom just before it heads for a date with disaster down below, the charming built-in google assistant queries if i could use one of her adept suggestions eminating from somewhere in the collective mind of google. up until saturday i left the mobile data switch off on the e6 so my daughter’s ravenous iphone 11 could completely consume all the monthly allowance and demand more. well, my data dealer had an excellent suggestion since i was having trouble managing my affairs he recommends “Unlimited.” so, thanks Ascaris for informing about building something that works…

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I just installed LineageOS… the credit for building it isn’t mine!

I’m just glad that Google develops their software the way they do, with an open source base that has all of the main functionality, and then their proprietary stuff on top, in Chrome as well as Android. The underlying base of each can function quite well on its own without the Google-branded bits, so it’s easy to take that and fork it to provide a product with most of the same functionality, or more if the developer wishes (as in the case of Vivaldi), but with the spying bits omitted.

Before Google did this, it seemed that the standard position of software developers was that if you gave away the base code of your product like this, you’d destroy your own product by letting anyone and everyone build their own competing product from your own code, but Google showed them otherwise. Chrome is by far the most-used Chromium browser even though they do give the code away (aside from some bits on the top), and the number of people who use alternative AOSP-derived OSes on their mobile devices is far less than those who use actual Android. While Google doesn’t charge for Chrome (and I have no idea if OEMs pay Google for Android), it does mean Google gets to call the shots, and that’s been tremendously profitable for them.

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I’m just glad that Google develops their software the way they do, with an open source base that has all of the main functionality, and then their proprietary stuff on top, in Chrome as well as Android.

Yes, yes. I really admire the way of thinking of open source community – lets make it all free and available! And if you still want more (no ads, extra functions), then you will pay. That is so nice and utopique at the same time. For mobile market, android and google have done so much, like noone else did.

I get iPhone for free at work, otherwise I would not purchase it. But in the past I also used HTC phones and ZTE phones too. You can say its from China and you dont like “big chinese brother watching”, but that is desilusion I say. They worked perfectly for me and I would recommend them, no chinese agency is up to me until today.

You can also try the latest folding screen phone from Russia! Im not sure about the name, but that is not important. Important is, that we all have nice christmass time in this difficult era.
Wish you nice christmass, everybody!

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doriel wrote:

Yes, yes. I really admire the way of thinking of open source community – lets make it all free and available! And if you still want more (no ads, extra functions), then you will pay. That is so nice and utopique at the same time. For mobile market, android and google have done so much, like noone else did.

I find it a lot more sinister. I don’t think Google’s intentions have anything to do with utopianism… it’s all part of their strategy to dominate the web and use it to their own advantage (much as MS tried to do 20 years ago). Open source is a means to an end, and while it has benefits for those of us who are obstinate enough to use forks of things like Android or Chromium, it doesn’t absolve them of the harm they do and have done.

The giants of internet advertising (Google, Facebook, Amazon) have swallowed the smaller players, so that if you want to run a site these days and have its costs paid for by advertising (as Woody once did here), you have little choice but to deal with one of the giants, and the giants are not just about advertising, but in spying. The concept of advertising that is unidirectional, like TV commercials, print ads, billboards, and product placement has been lost on the web, and now it’s just assumed that ads necessarily come with trackers.

I hate ads, and the more obtrusive ad, the worse, but I’d be a lot more inclined to allow ads on the sites I care about if those ads didn’t come with huge scripts that use up my RAM, bandwidth, and electricity to spy on me and perform actions that are against my interests, and on my own hardware. As long as ads come with all of that tracking, it’s not going to happen on the vast majority of sites. This site was one of a handful (single digits) of sites I had whitelisted back when it had ads.

That’s one of the things that Google has brought us… the expectation of spying and the blending of the concept of advertising and spying.

Google does have a lot of good services. If you’d told me years ago that I could get a satellite view of just about anywhere in the world, I’d have thought that was a fantasy. I’d have thought that even more so if someone had suggested that the satellite images could be made into 3d representations that I could view from any angle on my own PC. If you’d gone on to say I could get a 360 degree view of any point on nearly every mile of road in the world, and often at various points in time, I would have thought you were bonkers– the logistics and the sheer number of hours of labor that would take would be astronomical, I’d have said, and that’s impossible. Yet we have it now, “impossible” or not!

I just wish that Google had done all of this without building it on surveillance capitalism. It’s nice that Google’s development strategy means that I am able to use Vivaldi and LineageOS so that I can avoid the Google spying bits in the Google branded versions, but the necessity of doing that if I don’t want to have my private data made into a commodity that is owned by Google isn’t nice.

doriel wrote:

I get iPhone for free at work, otherwise I would not purchase it. But in the past I also used HTC phones and ZTE phones too. You can say its from China and you dont like “big chinese brother watching”, but that is desilusion I say. They worked perfectly for me and I would recommend them, no chinese agency is up to me until today.

Some people have said that about Google too, but it’s a fallacy to think that just because nothing bad has happened yet, that it never will. Drunk drivers used to justify their habit by saying that they’ve been driving drunk for years and never had anything bad happen.

I’m not terribly worried about Chinese, Russian, or other spying when it comes to my own stuff. I don’t have any state secrets I’d not want them to have, and if they assemble the same dossier of info on me that Google would… well, so what? If I was in Russia or China, that would concern me greatly, but over here in the US, I am a non-entity to Russia or China.

It’s my own government having the information that is the bigger threat. American law enforcement has already used Google tracking data to implicate someone as a suspect in a crime based solely on geographic proximity, and it turned out to be false. Had the government not had that information that the individual was in the area at the time, he never would have had to go through that.

Information that is never collected cannot be used against you.

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Thank you for your answer.

Some people have said that about Google too, but it’s a fallacy to think that just because nothing bad has happened yet, that it never will. Drunk drivers used to justify their habit by saying that they’ve been driving drunk for years and never had anything bad happen.

It makes me little bit sad, that you try to compare my habits to drinking behind the wheel. I know you didnt meant to harm, Im OK, no stress thats not good habit, since its against the law.
I know google is not good. But

If you’d gone on to say I could get a 360 degree view of any point on nearly every mile of road in the world, and often at various points in time, I would have thought you were bonkers– the logistics and the sheer number of hours of labor that would take would be astronomical, I’d have said, and that’s impossible. Yet we have it now, “impossible” or not!

I still think google is doing very lot of FUNCTIONAL things for vast majority of us. For “free”.

I was trying to explain, that no matter what I buy, I can still be hacked. And we were witnessing, that even Microsoft can be hacked. So why I should pay like three times more money for Apple iPhone, if ZTE can do the same for me?
And if they hack me from China, Im too far away to do any damage (since I handle my sensitive information very carefully).

I just wish that Google had done all of this without building it on surveillance capitalism.

I wish that too. I hate ads as you do. Id like ad-free world too. I think (in today world) most of lies/half-true comes from the advertisement and PR. This sector comes with never ending stream of stories about how everything is great. Its their job to talk about products nicely.
The world isnt perfect and world has its mistakes – if we forget this, then I think our future is not bright. Thats why I was talking about utopism. Open source for everybody without ads? That wont never happen.

PS – remember old phones? With keyboard lock on every telephone being the same? Weve come a long way baby..

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doriel wrote:

PS – remember old phones? With keyboard lock on every telephone being the same? Weve come a long way baby..

Eh? When was that ever a thing? Tone-dial landline phones approved for use in some part of the world or something like that?

I mean, I’ve used cellular phones already back when you had to manually set cell frequency on the radio part (yes, had a paper map with all the towers and frequencies on it) and keyboard lock was never standardized that I know of.

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Here are examples what I was thinking about:
unlock Nokia 3310 = menu button, then press*
unlock Siemens C35 = hold the # button
etc.

All cellphones were the same. If you lost it or someone stole it, he could use it easily. The only way to protect was to use the PIN code. Today its nearly impossible to unlock cellphone that does not belong to you.

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Oh, so not old phones then…

Well yeah, personalized lock was a major differentiator for a short while in SMS-capable phones. Had to buy the more expensive brand to get it

(I was doing that anyway to get the slightly better radio parts. Made a difference in rural areas, that.)

Content lock was of course not much of an issue with the older types of phones, with no storage or anything… and anyone could listen to you talk anyway if they had a simple receiver tuned appropriately. I remember it being a major reason to get a newer phone when it became possible to store quick-dial numbers on it, maybe ten or so… because that made it a lot easier for the field employees to get in contact with the office in a hurry. (Using the single analog cellular phone on the remote site.)

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Of course, I don’t compare something that can kill people (other people, not just yourself) to something that can only violate your privacy (but mostly only yours). I merely mean to illustrate that the logic behind “nothing bad has happened yet” doesn’t mean that it won’t. Like the optimist who fell off a tall building, and someone asked him from an open window as he passed by how it was going, and he said “so far, so good!” (Just an old joke.)

I would be more willing to tolerate ads if they were ONLY ads. I used to look forward to seeing ads in old car and computer magazines (on paper!)… I wanted to see what was available, and where, and for what price. But now, the idea of ads that don’t come with multiple massive trackers that try to assemble enough data to write an unauthorized autobiography is lost. It’s the tracking that is the worst offender.

 

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Twenty-five years ago, living as an ex-pat Brit in Texas, I was a late adopter.  My first mobile phone was a brick, when everyone else had fancy flip-fold phones.  I was flying back to Houston one evening, sitting next to a “master of the universe”.  He caught sight of my brick, said witheringly, “What’s that?”  “Mobile phone”, I said.  “Oh, I thought that you’d stolen the remote from your hotel last night”.

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doriel, Alex5723

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[Alex5723]

My first mobile phone was Motorola MicroTAC Alpha in ~94.
My first “smartphone” was the Nokia Communicator 9000i (I still have it).

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Alex5723.

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Alex5723 wrote:

My first mobile phone was Motorola MicroTAC Alpha in ~94.

Beat me by a scant 11 years!

 

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Have you ever wondered why people using a “modern” mobile phone talk so loudly when making a voice call? It didn’t happen when the land line was hanging on the Kitchen wall, unless of course there was a shouting match going on during the conversation. There was a technological short coming built into mobile phones to save money and avoid feedback that started to happen right after the mobile brick went out of style:
No voice fold back to the ear piece!
A lot of us know the old land line phones ran on a bridged voltage system from the CO. This allowed a portion of the microphone audio to be folded back in the handset to reach the ear through the ear piece in direct proportion to the volume of the speaker’s voice. If you spoke louder the folded back audio to the ear piece would increase giving you a sense of how loud you were talking. (That is why in the old movies you will see the person pull the land line phone away from their ear when they are going to shout at the other party).
Now there is also a further complication that exacerbates this situation. When you are on a voice call with a “modern” phone that does not have fold back you have some choices: hold the phone up to your ear, use over the ear headphones, use Bluetooth devices, or use built in speaker phone.
Speaker phone is usually not an option in public places so holding the phone to your ear, using headphones/buds or Bluetooth are the remaining options. When you hold the phone up to your ear, you effectively cut off half of your hearing. In addition to not having fold back to gauge how loud you are talking, you need to turn up the volume loud enough to hear because there is only a tiny speaker projecting the voice of the called party. It gets even worse if you have a headset or ear buds in both ears because you have cut your local hearing off completely. This is especially true if another technological advancement is in use on the audio called noise cancelation since you will now have no hope of hearing your local voice at all because it will be treated like noise and cancelled by the headphones.
Open air, single ear, Bluetooth devices are your best hope. They will keep you safer because you will at least be able to hear some of your own voice and the truck coming before you step off the curb but still nothing to write home about or even close to the old wall phone in the Kitchen.

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wavy

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I don’t know about that one

anonymous wrote:

This is especially true if another technological advancement is in use on the audio called noise cancellation (spelling corrected) since you will now have no hope of hearing your local voice at all because it will be treated like noise and cancelled by the headphones.

I notice when some folk put in sound blocking earplugs they speak softly because the sound of their own voices seems louder to them and they over compensate.

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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It was 7 years ago this week that I gave up my cell phone. It was a new years’ resolution that I have stuck with ever since.  The invasion of privacy was the central reason, but there were other reasons, too. I couldn’t figure out why someone would spend two hours texting back and forth when a simple two-minute phone call would have communicated the same message. I didn’t want to be caught up in that racket. So a year before I put the phone away, I called the carrier and had my data and internet blocked.  It was just a phone now.  Then when I looked at the minutes I used when the bill came in each month, I came to the conclusion it would be cheaper to use a pay phone. (If I could find one)

It blows my mind that so many people are using their phones as their primary gateway to the internet. I mean …. who wants to stare at a postcard-sized screen all day?  Really? Not me. I’m a free man. When I leave home, I go off the grid. No phone calls. No texts. No stupid ringtones or funny noises, no tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap all day and all night like I see other people do, and who are hopelessly addicted to their phones.

Digital heroin.

 

 

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I agree with your angle of view. People (including me) became addicted. Every year we go to woods for few days, sleep in a tent and our cell phones are turned off in the baggage, just for case of emergency. I think I will adopt your attitude and leave the cellphone at home when going out.
Im 33 and I think we were the first real generation of gamers (me and my friends we were able to spend whole day with Heroes 3, Need For Speed 2 or Baldurs Gate). We were raised in society, where this new technology was cutting edge. Computers were very interesting and fantasy invoking. for me. Later on, I started programming which caught me for next decade.
These addictions are made “by design”. Its developpers intention to have addicted users, thus making money. Until we wont change rules in electronic world, nothing will change. Children have nothing to compare and if parents dont tell them, they will spend like 8 hours a day on their cellphone.

The question is, are they going to be as socialized as we are? I see in lot of families small childred (2+ years) watching cellphone during the dinner for example. Its so easy for parents to let them look. Children can play with cell phone and parents dont need to take care. Same as we sat in front of television. At least mobile phone has the possibility of interaction between two people, TV does not.

So there are two sides of this – I think children are not so well socialized and internet can create very unrealistic picture of the world as a whole, plus you are reachable everywhere, there is just no privacy and calmness in today world.
On the other hand they are free and they could reach nearly every person on the planet, so they have a tool, which humans dreamed all its history. It will be fatal mistake, if we use such powerfull (cell phone) mainly for advertising.

I personally, would ban advertisement targeted on children. Its so immoral. Children belive in everything. And if you repeat ten times, that Lays chips are best in the world, it will became their reality. And thats where we need to be very very carefull. We need a roadmap

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I strongly dislike what “cell phone culture” has done to the country (and probably the other ones too), but it was a video of a Ted talk on Youtube explaining what cell phone addiction does to the brain that ironically was part of what made me give in. It’s the always-on nature that leads to other people expecting instant feedback on texts, social media posts, and all kinds of things, that leads to the problem. You make a social media post, you wait anxiously for the notification sound, you eagerly pick up the phone for your instant fix of validation. Seeing likes on your picture or post apparently is gratifying, so you get the little shot of dopamine, but it’s short-lasting, so in a few minutes, you’re jonesin’ for another hit.

Social media is designed to foster this behavior. The more compelled people are to keep posting, to keep reading others’ posts, to keep using the service, the more ads they can serve you. Addictive people will see more ads than those who are not addictive.

I don’t do social media on or off a phone though. I don’t text. I’ve had the capability to receive and send texts since I got my first dumb phone in ~2006, but I’ve sent, hm, about five, lifetime total. I don’t get notified when an email arrives… I check it periodically when I want to, same as all the other internet stuff. I don’t intend to connect any of my “real” email addresses to the phone.

In my hands, a smart phone is just a smaller, slower, much harder to use PC, used for the same things. Trying to use it to browse for more than a few minutes is a particular kind of torture… I can’t imagine having a phone as a primary computing device. Watching movies on that tiny screen? Yeah, I can do it, but I’d really rather not. I’m not young enough to be able to focus on a phone display without reading glasses (no bifocals at this time), and I don’t need them for my laptops. The focal distance to my Dell G3 (which I am using now to write this) is just about ideal when it is used at a standard distance. Having a real keyboard, a large screen, a discrete pointing device, it’s no contest whatsoever which I prefer.

My main purpose in the phone, actually, is to be able to provide mobile internet (via tether) for my laptops, especially the Swift (which comes with me very often). The flip phone I bought recently has 4g and VoLTE, but the carrier disabled the wifi hotspot feature on it, even though my plan allows tethering right up to my data limit, and there is no carrier-unlocked model with all the features intact. If I am going to have the phone on me anyway, and I am going to have the laptop with me often, if I can combine those to have internet on the PC wherever I go without having to carry any extra gear… that can be quite useful.

I bought the smallest smart phone I could find that had an unlockable bootloader and a decent enthusiast community (so there are aftermarket ROMs available, and hopefully will be for several years) and that was cheap. It’s less than full HD (1080p), let alone 4k, but ya know, it has more pixels per inch than any of my three 1080p displays (Swift 13.3″, Dell G3 15.6″, desktop 23″), and the only one that I can really perceive the pixels in normal use is the desktop. I can see them if I try to on the laptops (especially the Dell), but I’ve never thought I wanted a higher resolution (with its lower frame rates and higher power consumption). A larger color gamut for the Dell, most certainly, which I did get with an upgrade, but the resolution is fine. On the phone, I can’t see pixels at all with the reading glasses on (and certainly I cannot without them). Anything smaller than I can perceive is pointless.

 

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doriel

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I have a smartphone, lemme see, where is it?

I know how to stop, as much as you can, locationing and use an adblocker that makes using the phone almost fun.  Phones are regulated differently than computers, in US anyway, so expecting good privacy on one is pipedream.

A big issue I have with them is they’re big, way too big to stow and forget.  You see phone addicts walking around with “broken arm in a sling” posture, elbows shoved into their ribcages, hand out front, phone always visible, a moving roadblock.  Time it right and you can pass them without a collision.  Tip: when they fade left, count 1,2, then pass on the left, a right fade is imminent.  Works for phone drivers, too!

They’re also too small to display much info. “I got 4k, man!”  Uh, so what?  Phones are designed to be ad servers, UHD ads are irrelevant.  VR makes you dizzy.

My phone is a Moto E LTE, 2015 vintage.  Smallest one I could find, probably why it cost $40 in a 2016 closeout, but I still have to put it in my pocket just right or I can’t sit down.  My old flip phones were good enough and would do most of what my smartphone will but scrolling on a 2 in screen ain’t much fun.

By far, the best phone I’ve ever had was one of those Nokia candy bar phones circa. 2005.

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I’m wondering how long it will be before smartphones get implanted into human brains with cochlear ear implants for sound, and corneal implants for the viewscreen.  Hopefully these can be turned off with a tap on the temple.  Bed pillows will come with charging stations built in.

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Watch the movie “The President’s Analyst” (1967) starring James Coburn.

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doriel, Charlie

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Bravo! It all seems just another way to suck money out of our pockets at regular intervals.

I just bought a smartphone for the first time after I was told my old phone (practically unused after 6+ years) won’t work anymore with the new networks. I don’t own a camera so I thought, why not, at least this can take decent pictures. I was horrified by the Google grip, so I did a few things to loosen it somewhat – I hadn’t heard about the deGoogled phones until after I’d ordered this (I definitely want to look into changing the OS). All the pre-installed social media apps are gone, along with everything else that I could uninstall, so basically it’s just an overpriced flip-phone. And since I go almost nowhere and never carry it with me when I do – only when driving any distance, just in case of emergency – and it’s turned off 99% of the time, Google isn’t getting too much return for its investment. I hope.

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Charlie wrote:

I’m wondering how long it will be before smartphones get implanted into human brains

You could ask Elon Musk he has the answer.

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