Liberating and a huge pain: my week with a Nokia ‘dumbphone’ | Mobile phones

After about 10 minutes of furious tapping on the tiny buttons to write a still unfinished text the anger I’m feeling towards the “retro” Nokia 3210 I’m toiling over is mounting.

It is one of a new wave of “detox” or “dumb” phones aimed at techno-stressed individuals who want to escape the thrall of apps and notifications but, in this moment, I really want to smash it.

The text is to my friend. The worst part is I’m escorting a school trip round the Museum of London Docklands so have been trying not to look at my phone at all.

Now the 11-year-olds I’m with are wondering two things: why is this woman so bad at texting, and why is her phone rubbish?

I consider giving up because it’s getting embarrassing and the matter only semi-urgent but persevere to the end of what reads like an SOS.

More people, especially Gen Zers and millennials, are switching to brick phones such as this 00s favourite, which has been reissued owing to mental health concerns brought on by smartphones and social media use.

If I was starting my first term as a boarder at Eton in September I’d be saying goodbye to my iPhone 12 as well as my parents. It is banning new pupils from bringing smartphones in favour of bricks, and other schools are urging parents to buy low-tech devices.

So, for the first time in more than a decade I have no access to my work email and can barely access the internet on the go.

Unfortunately, if you’re interested in news, this is a bad day to be offline. People are still coming to terms with the Donald Trump assassination attempt and England’s defeat in the Euro 2024 final.

I haven’t figured out how to turn on predictive text, so messaging, for the time being anyway, is out of the question.

While there are plenty of good reasons to keep smartphones away from children, I soon discover that trying to decouple as an adult is liberating and also a massive pain, because the technology has encroached so far into everyday life.

When did you last consult a pocket diary or train timetable, or carry around a paperback and a map? Ditto a weekly train ticket and wallet full of bank and loyalty cards. I was equipped with all these things when I moved to London over 20 years ago and played Snake on the original much-loved Nokia 3210, which came out in 1999.

Now I do all these things with apps, as well as read the news, send emails, shop and check the weather – and I don’t even like technology.

The (long) list of other things that smartphones have swallowed up, Pac-Man-style, since I last used a handset like this include bank branches, ticket offices, cameras and the satnav. If you are going to divorce your digital life it takes some doing.

On the first morning of my smartphone-free week, commuters cocooned in their headphones swiped phones and smartwatches at the train station while I looked on wistfully, fishing out an increasingly neglected bank card.

There was no “wave and pay” for my morning americano, either, and it soon dawned on me that I had nothing to read. There would be no scanning headlines, X or filtering the emails. There would also be no mindless Instagram content on how to dress, apply makeup or tackle DIY.

The experiment had got off to a bad start the night before. About half an hour in to finding my way around the handset my husband turned to me and announced: “I hate this phone already.” This was mainly because I had not managed to switch off the boing sound accompanying every key press. Old-school phones have a lot of menus.

The adverts for this Nokia reboot, now made by Finland’s HMD, feature a model made up like a Friends-era Jennifer Aniston. The marketing blurb for what is billed as a “detox phone” promises: “If it’s important they’ll call or text” and says: “Let’s throw back to Y2K, when conversations mattered more than likes and shares.” Just as well, because surfing the net on it brings back memories of dial-up broadband.

“Burner” phones are popular with festival-goers worried about losing high-end devices, so do come with some mod cons, including 4G, Bluetooth and a camera. You can take selfies and videos, although the footage reminded me of the Blair Witch Project.

Obviously, for many people, going without a smartphone is not a choice. There are 2.4m households in the UK that cannot afford a mobile phone contract at a time when essential services such as healthcare and benefits are moving online. Parking is now a horror show of apps and QR codes, but luckily the ones where I live still had a phone number to call.

Over the week, a lot of things had to wait until I was at my computer, including checking my bank account and credit card bill. And as far as my Back to the Future phone was concerned, online shopping had still not been invented. (My watch did continue to count my steps, however).

With my Clubcard in digital limbo, on several occasions I also found myself loitering at the Tesco checkouts trying to get someone to “give me a scan” so I could pay loyalty, not stupid, prices.

Also not everyone will have got the memo that you are offline. Sure, you are less likely to be scammed, but life will continue on Signal and WhatsApp and you’ll soon find yourself at the school gate asking: “What do you mean it’s a mufti day?”

One thing you can’t fault dumb or “feature” phones on, however, is cost. They are sturdier and have epic battery life. This one cost £75, while the latest iteration of the iPhone starts at £800.

Towards the end of the pandemic I had a wake-up call about my screen use. My memory seemed to be faltering. The diagnosis was painful: I had stopped listening and was too busy looking at my phone.

By the end of my week, the dumbphone was growing on me, or rather I didn’t hate it any more. I’d turned on predictive text and the hole in my life where emojis used to be was filled when, LOL, I remembered “text speak” and discovered the smileys menu.

And lest we forget, it’s got Snake, a game billed as peak “newstalgia”, although give me X any day with its jokes, memes and mad threads about the Windsor agreement. I now realise that romanticising about old tech is a bit like watching Life on Mars and getting nostalgic about policing in the 70s. I will never do it again.

A brick phone does make you less mobile-obsessed but seems best suited to people who don’t want to be contacted or are on holiday, rather than someone with a job and kids. It’s a lot easier to put the powerful computer in your pocket on silent than the digital genie back into the bottle.