Wellington - When I dropped my cellphone on a recent flight, the man who kindly picked it up joked that it was an antique. It had ricocheted along the floor and the back broke off, the battery bounced under a seat and the key pad came unstuck. But I knew without a doubt that when I pieced the parts together, it would beep back to life.
And it did. That wasn’t the case when I accidentally ran over it in my own driveway while researching this story.
Until that unfortunate day, however, my phone had survived being dropped, chewed, and Sellotaped for the past 10 years all the while performing an exemplary calling and SMSing service. It didn’t have a camera, the numbers had worn off the keypad and the colour faded to off white. This relic was the second cellphone I’ve ever owned and a not-too-distant relative of the first mobile phone made 40 years ago.
The act of getting my phone out of my bag had started to attract comments and curious stares. My mother-in-law recently asked me if it was my children’s toy or a real one. And my gym instructor stared at it for what seemed like a full minute before exclaiming “oh, it’s a phone!”
But I’ve been proud of my brick and haven’t felt the need to upgrade. This is partly because I’m a cheapskate and prone to procrastination about expensive purchases. For all those people who think I’m backward, I too am a snob. After all, if everyone else around the dinner table is tweeting and such on their phone, where’s the conversation going?
That’s why I feel quite chuffed that the Oxford Dictionary has included a new noun for phones like mine in its latest intake of words: dumbphone. The dictionary defines it as “a basic mobile phone that lacks the advanced functionality characteristic of a smartphone”, which includes surfing the internet, receiving and sending e-mails, and downloading applications like the popular time-wasting game Angry Birds.
But get this – worldwide there are still six dumbphones out there for every smartphone. That puts me in the majority.
The New York Times has reported on a “small but hardy contingent of smartphone holdouts” who scorn Angry Birds and fear their susceptibility to an e-mail-checking addiction.
The article quoted Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. In the book, Carr argues that surfing the web rewires people to be better at multitasking, but reduces the ability to stay focused and think interpretatively.
“You see a similar type of compulsive behaviour (to computer assisted web surfing) but it can go on continuously from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep,” he said of smartphones.
An article in the Atlantic Wire last year named the reasons dumbphones have such loyal owners. It says fear of addiction, the benefits of disconnectivity, cost, durability and anti-consumerism all play a role.
“But beneath all of that, we think this cult boils down to pride. When dumbphone owners talk about their opposition to the future it’s always framed with a sort of hip-to-be-square attitude,” the story said.
New Zealander Matt Bates is among this diehard group. He’s 34, and very tech-literate given he works as an IT business analyst and developer. He’s the only person at his workplace who doesn’t own a smartphone. “I’m ironically proud. I get to be the odd guy out,” says of his three-year-old cellphone.
His favourite joke is returning his colleagues’ complaints about their short-life smartphone batteries with his own – that he used to charge his every two weeks and now has to plug it in every week. For Bates, sitting at a computer each day then going home to a young family means he gets all the screen time he needs at work.
It can be very amusing to be part of this stubborn convoy. I travelled to overseas tech-fests and conferences when I worked as a business reporter. One of these, in Barcelona, showcased the latest futuristic communication devices. My friends thought it was hilarious I’d been sent to cover this event with a relic phone in my bag, and I have to admit to feeling like a bit of an impostor at the time.
We (my dumbphone and I) also attended a technology fair at Seattle’s Microsoft HQ. This event showed off the latest in robotics and journalists from around the world attended it. On the bus to the fair, I sat next to an American reporter who was covering technology for one of the major daily newspapers. When he saw my phone, he started asking me about grass huts. I’m not the only owner of a brick to have copped flak.
Lesley Hopkins, 37, a consultant planner, says others have called her old phone steam-powered and told her to get with the times. She recently had to replace her faulty cellphone but chose to stick with a dumbphone because of its durability.
“It’s indestructible. When I went into the shop to buy it I said I wanted a rock-solid phone that was unbreakable. The guy started to show me smartphones, I don’t think he believed me. If I had bought a smartphone I would’ve killed it 10 times over by now,” says Hopkins.
She says people comment on her phone but she doesn’t care about being hip. “It’s the same theory as my car. It’s old and run down but gets me from A to B, why trade in a perfectly good phone?”
Others really like the fact that if it’s urgent, they get a phone call rather than being messaged via Facebook. – New Zealand Herald