While it doesn't seem like that long ago that smartphones were simply nice to have luxury items,
these days they feel like a virtual necessity, so much so that over 80% of American adults
owns a smartphone. But despite the fact that many of you would probably feel pretty crippled if you
had to go about your day without your maps and your calendar, older style feature phones or
dumb phones have actually experienced a surge in popularity recently. But why? I mean, it seems
like you can't even pour yourself a glass of juice these days without firing up the appropriate
app. Well, before we can explain, we need to define a dumb phone. It's a mobile phone without
full-fledged internet capabilities, so no general purpose web browsing, no social media,
no high-res video playback, and while you can obviously call people, even texting often has
to be done through the old T9 system where you have to mash the number keys to get the corresponding
letters. As for why anyone would want to use such a cut-down device given the affordability of ones
that do so much more, well, smartphone burnout is a real phenomenon with a recent survey indicating
that 40% of people in Britain feel like they spend too much time on their smartphones. In fact,
the average person apparently checks their social media notifications about once every 12 minutes,
my camera operator is doing it right now, leaving many people feeling like they're addicted to their
gadgets. And it kind of makes sense that people would burn out. I mean, think of the barrage of
notifications, many of them extraneous, that you're hit with every day and the never-ending
flow of information not to mention negativity online and on social media. Some celebrities even
have been seen using flip phones again, helping to make going back to dumb phones a small but
noticeable trend. And even if you're not experiencing smartphone burnout with their simplicity and
longer battery life, dumb phones are becoming increasingly popular as a secondary device,
rather than as a replacement for a smartphone. For when people want to just feel like disconnecting
for a while, but still having something that can send calls and texts in an emergency,
just without the distraction of full internet connectivity. But while the classic flip phones
are still available from mobile carriers, a third class of device is also trying to help people unplug.
Minimalist phones are trying to bridge the gap between the dumb phones of yesterday and the
do-it-all smartphones of today. Gadgets like the Lightphone 2 and the Punked MP02 aren't dumb
phones in the sense that they're basically the same devices that we were using 15 years ago.
They have 4G and Wi-Fi capabilities, which makes them useful for tethering to a laptop,
for example, if you really need to get something done. But what you can do on the devices themselves
is intentionally limited. For example, the Lightphone 2 uses Android, but you don't get
access to tons of apps. Instead, the team behind it is trying to make custom versions of apps that
don't have as many options. Additionally, notifications are very unintrusive, there's
no web browser or social media, and no photo messaging. As for the aforementioned Punked MP02,
it has a physical dial pad with a completely text-only interface, so you won't see any icons
for apps or notifications. So the thing with these phones is that while their prices are higher than
some people would like, probably due to their small production runs, unsurprisingly, both of them
are significantly cheaper than most smartphones. So they could be interesting choices if you've
gotten super tired of modern life, but not so much so that you're ready to go live in the woods
and communicate exclusively with smoke signals. So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike,
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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.