#oneaday Day 159: To upgrade… or downgrade?

I’m due an upgrade on my phone, and for the first time I’m holding off because I’m not sure I want one. All the new phones are rammed with AI bullshit and I don’t want to encourage that crap in any way whatsoever, so the prospect of getting one makes me a tad uneasy.

The other thing that is causing me to hold off is a growing desire to break my attachment to smartphones. I don’t like being dependent on a smartphone. I don’t like having that stupid black rectangle follow me everywhere I go. I don’t like feeling like I compulsively “have” to fiddle with it if I don’t have anything to say or anything to do.

There are a few things stopping me from immediately ditching my smartphone and “downgrading” to a modern feature phone. I thought I’d ponder each of them in turn. I probably won’t come to a conclusion, but it might help me sort some things out in my mind. And maybe it’ll be helpful for you, too, I don’t know.

WhatsApp

I don’t use WhatsApp as much as a lot of people, but I do have a few ongoing chats that are my sole means of connection with friends I haven’t seen for a while. On top of that, the people from my job use WhatsApp for communication outside of work — for example, when we’re having a group social trip together.

Giving up WhatsApp would mean giving up a connection to people I don’t want to “disconnect” from entirely, and would also make life inconvenient for my work colleagues. That last one I’m not super concerned about, but I do like my job and my colleagues, so I don’t really want to be a pain.

Beyond those maybe two group chats (both of which have declined in activity anyway) and my work colleagues, I’m not super attached to WhatsApp. I could probably live without it.

The camera

Phone cameras these days are pretty excellent. I shoot anything that isn’t direct capture from gaming hardware on my phone. Upgrading my phone would mean I can get an even better camera.

However, two things: 1) I can still use the camera on my existing phone even if it doesn’t have a SIM card in it (I think, anyway). And 2) I could just, y’know, buy a nice camera.

So while it’s certainly convenient to be able to snap photos and take video with a device that is with me anyway, it’s probably not actually a dealbreaker in this situation.

Music and podcasts

I am, I’m afraid, “part of the problem” with music, though not out of any belief that streaming is “better” than having your own collection of tunes. It’s just a lot more convenient to be able to stream music (I use YouTube Music, because I have YouTube Premium and might as well use the additional benefit) and podcasts from, again, a device I have with me anyway. Plus my phone’s Bluetooth connects to my car stereo with no difficulty, making it easy to queue up entertainment for long journeys, such as my monthly drive to the office.

I haven’t looked at standalone MP3 (or equivalent) players for probably 20+ years at this point. I’m sure they exist. In fact, hold on.

It seems I can get a cheap Chinese shitbox for £20-£30, or I can spend three thousand pounds on a gold Sony thing (just £659.80 a month!) if I’m feeling particularly insane. What the actual fuck.

Uh… anyway. MP3 players do indeed still exist, and many of them have Bluetooth. Some of them even have WiFi, and some of them take the iPod touch approach where they’re basically a phone without the “phone” bit. I will steer clear of those, at least, because that would just be replacing one problem with the same problem, but mildly less convenient.

So an MP3 player with a decent capacity is not expensive. That would require me to organise my MP3 library, though, which has been in a right state since Google Music (RIP) invited me to upload it all “to access anywhere”, then promptly closed down and was replaced with the considerably inferior YouTube Music… and when I downloaded it all again the organisation was all fucked.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world to have to do that, but I’d rather not have to. So I think we can consider the music player side of things covered.

Navigation

In-car navigation is easily solved: buy a satnav. But I also use Google Maps when I’m on foot to see what’s nearby and figure out how to get to places. That is a problem that is a little trickier to solve. GPS devices for on-foot navigation certainly exist, but they’re primarily geared towards hiking and cost more than I’d be willing to spend on something that I’d only use occasionally, particularly if I had already bought a satnav for the car.

I can’t see an easy solution to this one. I believe some feature phones are able to access a Web-based form of Google Maps, but I don’t know how useful or effective that is.

I mean, I guess I could kick it really old school and just buy an A to Z of wherever I happened to be going. I can’t check what time Sainsbury’s closes with one of those, though, unless they’ve considerably enhanced the level of detail they go into since I last used one.

Conclusion?

I could probably find solutions to all of the above problems, except WhatsApp. I believe there are some feature phones that are capable of using a text-only version of WhatsApp, but from a cursory glance around earlier today it seems a lot of them don’t work in the UK for some reason.

I will continue to mull it over. The prospect of truly breaking free from the smartphone becomes increasingly appealing day by day… I’m just not quite sure I’m truly ready to pull the plug. My main concern is suddenly running into a use case that I haven’t thought of while farting this blog post out of an evening, and then being kind of fucked when I’m stuck with a modern-day Nokia and no means of fulfilling the function I suddenly, urgently require.

But really, what might that even be? It can’t be that important, or I would have thought of it by now, surely.

Anyway, I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion. But I have definitely convinced myself that there are at least some of the features I use on my smartphone that I absolutely can live without. Is that enough, though?

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