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While it doesn't seem like that long ago that smartphones were simply nice to have luxury items,

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these days they feel like a virtual necessity, so much so that over 80% of American adults

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owns a smartphone. But despite the fact that many of you would probably feel pretty crippled if you

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had to go about your day without your maps and your calendar, older style feature phones or

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dumb phones have actually experienced a surge in popularity recently. But why? I mean, it seems

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like you can't even pour yourself a glass of juice these days without firing up the appropriate

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app. Well, before we can explain, we need to define a dumb phone. It's a mobile phone without

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full-fledged internet capabilities, so no general purpose web browsing, no social media,

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no high-res video playback, and while you can obviously call people, even texting often has

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to be done through the old T9 system where you have to mash the number keys to get the corresponding

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letters. As for why anyone would want to use such a cut-down device given the affordability of ones

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that do so much more, well, smartphone burnout is a real phenomenon with a recent survey indicating

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that 40% of people in Britain feel like they spend too much time on their smartphones. In fact,

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the average person apparently checks their social media notifications about once every 12 minutes,

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my camera operator is doing it right now, leaving many people feeling like they're addicted to their

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gadgets. And it kind of makes sense that people would burn out. I mean, think of the barrage of

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notifications, many of them extraneous, that you're hit with every day and the never-ending

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flow of information not to mention negativity online and on social media. Some celebrities even

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have been seen using flip phones again, helping to make going back to dumb phones a small but

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noticeable trend. And even if you're not experiencing smartphone burnout with their simplicity and

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longer battery life, dumb phones are becoming increasingly popular as a secondary device,

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rather than as a replacement for a smartphone. For when people want to just feel like disconnecting

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for a while, but still having something that can send calls and texts in an emergency,

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just without the distraction of full internet connectivity. But while the classic flip phones

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are still available from mobile carriers, a third class of device is also trying to help people unplug.

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Minimalist phones are trying to bridge the gap between the dumb phones of yesterday and the

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do-it-all smartphones of today. Gadgets like the Lightphone 2 and the Punked MP02 aren't dumb

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phones in the sense that they're basically the same devices that we were using 15 years ago.

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They have 4G and Wi-Fi capabilities, which makes them useful for tethering to a laptop,

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for example, if you really need to get something done. But what you can do on the devices themselves

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is intentionally limited. For example, the Lightphone 2 uses Android, but you don't get

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access to tons of apps. Instead, the team behind it is trying to make custom versions of apps that

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don't have as many options. Additionally, notifications are very unintrusive, there's

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no web browser or social media, and no photo messaging. As for the aforementioned Punked MP02,

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it has a physical dial pad with a completely text-only interface, so you won't see any icons

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for apps or notifications. So the thing with these phones is that while their prices are higher than

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some people would like, probably due to their small production runs, unsurprisingly, both of them

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are significantly cheaper than most smartphones. So they could be interesting choices if you've

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gotten super tired of modern life, but not so much so that you're ready to go live in the woods

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and communicate exclusively with smoke signals. So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike,

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check out other channels, leave a comment with video suggestions, don't forget to subscribe or

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I will nibble on your toes in your sleep, and only if you have nice toes actually now that I think of it.