Well I’ve had a smartphone since 2012, just to try it. Honestly I don’t feel it has added quality to my life. Having specialized devices such as a camera, GPS, mp3 player and so on is actually more convenient and not more expensive. For example a GPS has a longer and more reliable battery life.
Truth be told I have a Motorola Droid running Android 1 and if all you need is a phone with some email and sms texting it works fantastic. Even has a physical keyboard.
No at some point they become uselessly slow or won’t receive necessary updates. Like even some dumb chat app requires a ton of resources. And I’ve also had an iPhone that worked just fine until there was an update. After that it wasn’t practical to use any more and I switched back to android.
I’ve had 4. And I’ve used each one until it was completely useless.
I bought 2 of those 4 for my work. I do vr/ar and some clients require ar on the phone or tablet. And I needed one of them when I had an Airbnb, because you need the app for that. The again you can replace that with android running on a pi or sum.
The smallest camera I can pocket weighs 5x my phone, is about 10x thicker.
GPS, same.
Mp3 player, about the same as my phone.
Computer/web browser? Well, nothing is as small as a phone.
I get all that in a single device with a phone weighing 8oz, measuring 6"x3"x3/8".
Separate devices is better if your use-cases for them have strong independence (e.g. Only use GPS in the car/on motorcycle, only use a camera when doing dedicated photo shoots, etc). If anything I’d say multiple devices is less convenient even then, it’s just that those devices work better for those use-cases, making the tradeoff of less convenient worthwhile. I’d much rather use a dedicated camera sometimes (and do), when I’m taking lots of pics and want to go faster.
But for most people, these activities are strongly related, and occur throughout their day. It would be far less convenient to carry multiple devices and have to pull them out and handle for these activities.
That depends on what you want out of them. If you want to minimize the amount of stuff you’re carrying around as your top priority, sure, phones are great. But if you want ease of use for a specific task without unwanted interference? They’re not always the best.
Like, if I were doing any sort of meaningful photography, I’d want my actual camera. It’s easier to shoot with, it allows for more control, and no notifications or phone calls are going to suddenly interrupt a shot.
When it comes to a music player, it’s mostly good, but what if I want to keep listening to music while doing other stuff on my phone, or while talking to someone? Phones are pretty bad at that sort of multitasking. There are certain websites I can’t read while listening to spotify, because something completely inaudible takes over the sound channel as soon as I load the page.
As to making phone calls? The number of dropped calls or calls with one-way audio is absolutely absurd, and not something I ever ran into on older dumb phones.
Convenience ultimately depends on use case. It is nice to always have some kind of camera on me, even if it’s kind of a half assed one. Ditto to a computer, a music player, and a phone. But they’re definitely not more convenient to use.
There’s a reason dials, macropads, tablets, midi devices, and things like that are popular. It’s usually a lot easier to control physical stuff sitting in front of you than it is to interface with some abstracted UI. Like, typing is so bad on phones that it spurred the creation of contemporary AI.
And then install your main Apps from F-Droid (all Open Source and reviewed) and put eventual proprietary apps (get them from Aurora instead of Play) in a Shelter/Insular profile.
If you can’t get a Pixel, look for a phone on the DivestOS list (or the Lineage list, it can be way better than stock Android since it lacks Google anything).
DivestOS is Lineage, with some more work done, kind of between Lineage and Graphene. I really like it, actually prefer it over Graphene for my use-case (it can run MicroG as a user app in a work profile, so kind of a stepping stone for getting away from Google).
If your concern is whether your cellphone carrier has the ability to see who you are calling and for how long, this is true whether you have a smartphone or a “regular” phone.
With a regular phone they can also fairly accurately tell where you are, and read your texts. The main difference is the information goes to the carrier but not straight to Google or Apple.
They can do so with a smartphone too, they both use the same cellular network, so same voice calls, same plain-text text messages (SMS is a feature of the cellular network management, messages are injected into the cell management frames).
Even worse, smartphones use AGPS, so download from AGPS servers (providing another point of location data) and using that ephemeris data to improve location update times.
My 2 cents: I have a similar relation with smartphones as yours.
In my case, what I fear the most is some app getting my contact list and using it to send some kind of “XXX has joined YYY service” notification to all of them. Also, I didn’t like that Google had all the data they wanted, so I ended with 2 smartphones:
One de-googled (LineageOS without Google Apps) that I use for calls and trusted apps. This one has my contacts list.
One default Android-Google without simcard for those apps that require oficial-Android (mainly banks apps) and any app I’m afraid could mess with the contact list.
AFAIK I’ve only had one incident because I trusted Telegram too much. There is always non-zero risk, but this works for me.
Similar setup here, for same reasons. But I go further: my contact list is empty. Not a problem if your contacts are all on Signal or Telegram rather than SMS or Whatsapp. IMO contact lists are privacy scourge #1. They allow everyone to grass on their friends with zero consent.
Pretty much. Do your thing, talk to people about it if they seem genuinely interested but definitely don’t go around trying to convince people that they need to take their digital privacy more seriously. They will view you as annoying and/or a lunatic and become permanently turned off to the concept. The hard sell isn’t anywhere near as effective as some people think.
But when I log in via my Musicbrainz account it just loads indefinitely. Seems to be a bug with some server cache on their side at least someone said so in the forum. Maybe it works with another account.
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