Get Your Hands Off My Flipping Flipphone!
Benefits of a flipphone, you say? Let me count the ways...
I have a flipphone. And yes, it’s a beautiful thing. People come up to me regularly and lust after it like they would if it was a brand-spanking new iPhone 15. To be honest, most people don’t notice. But some do. And when they do, it’s awesome. It’s exactly the kind of attention I’m looking for. I don’t care if you compliment me on my dashing appearance, my soft, brown locks, my stylish beard or my piercing blue eyes. I’m just looking for you to notice my flipphone so I can strike up a conversation about how cool they are, and then I can mention I don’t have a smartphone.
Okay, I don’t actually humble-brag about this a lot. Most times I just mention sincerely and non-chalantly that, yeah, I have a flipphone. And I leave it at that because I am deep down a humble and quiet spirit.
But people’s reactions to my flipphone alone are worth ditching my smartphone for.
I don’t, of course, have a flipphone just to be noticed. Because as I mentioned, most are too busy looking down at their own phones to notice anything about me.
Okay, I know you probably know this arleady, but there are a ton of benefits to having a flipphone. I will enumerate three of them now.
1) Battery life—It will probably take another 37 years before the tech gods are able to find a way to get the smartphone batteries to last as long as my flipphone battery lasts. I charge it about once a week (yes, you read that right), AND, get this, it only takes about 30 minutes to charge. Amen! Hallelujah. The angels sing flipphone praises in heaven every time I reach over and charge it, again, just once a week.
Compare that to smartphone charging. I get battery-charging PTSD every time I even think about charging my old smartphone. I had an older model and it usually only made it through about three-quarters of my day. What?! Ridiculous. I would be out and about and constantly asking, When is my phone going to die? I would look down to see how much battery life I had left and it would already be dead.
Now, you might be thinking, yeah, but I have a new phone. It’s battery lasts the whole freaking day. Wow. Congratulations. But you still almost certainly have to be plugging it in every night before you tuck yourself in to bed. Not fun. Some would call this a ball and chain.
Then sometimes I would charge it in my car. That never worked. It always took forever to charge. And the charging cords that Apple gives us so generously for free when we buy that new phone can be measured in millimeters not inches. I mean, come on. At least you could give us longer cords to keep these devices juiced.
My solution? Cut the cord. Ditch the smartphone! Trade your nightly routine of plugging your phone in before bed with the joys of not even thinking about your phone before bed.
2) Ending calls—When you finish a phone call with someone on your smartphone, it’s not hard, but it’s definitely not fun. You just push the red button on the screen. Or push some other button on the side of the phone to end it. Or you stare at the phone and the call magically ends because the other person pushed their red button. I’m not impressed.
With my flipphone, I have the simple pleasure of slamming the phone shut. Yeah, you remember those days, right? When you ended a call and you freaking new the call was over. You felt like an executive, a real boss, closing that phone shut, flipping it down. When I end a call now people can hear the slamming noise miles away. It’s awesome! And fun! Hanging up on your ex-girlfriend by slamming your flipphone shut is a joy unlike anything else you will ever experience.
It’s actually another thing people say when they see my flipphone: I love how you can hang up on people and flip it closed like that. Smartphones will never give you that kind of tactile and soul-feeding satisfaction.
3) Notifications—With my flipphone, I never have to turn notifications off. It’s a dumb phone. It’s never heard of notifications. It’s like no one ever told it that it’s sole purpose was to annoy me and bug me with chirps and beeps and blips and screens and little ugly boxes and colors and numbers throughout the day that will only serve to rob me of productivity.
Instead, my flipphone knows its role; it knows its purpose in the universe; it knows what it was born to do. To call people; that’s it. And to not suck battery like a blood leech.
My flipphone never notifies me of anything and it’s glorious. It does tell me if I missed a call. Or if I get a text. Or if there’s a tornado coming my way (that’s helpful). Or if there’s an Amber alert. But those notices are few and far between. I can go about my day knowing that the only interruption I will have is my wife calling and asking me to pick up eggs at the store on the way home from work.
I know, I know. You can turn notifications off on your smartphone. But it seems that no matter how many times you silence notifications, your smartphone still finds ways to ping you. And plus, smartphones train you to check them all the time. So even if you’re not being notified, you’re still trained to check it constantly to see what you might be missing.
There’s more my flipphone can do that I’ll write about in the future. And there’s more I’ll say, much more, about the real benefits of a flipphone—all the things it doesn’t do.
But now you know at least three benefits of a flipphone from a bona fide flipphone user. Even if you never ditch your smartphone, you’ll still have that little voice in the back of your head telling you, There’s a better way.
And maybe, just maybe, some day, in the distant future, when you’re spending half your day charging your phone, and pushing that little red button, and reading its notifications, you’ll remember this post, you’ll remember the words of this humble writer, and you’ll consider, even for the briefest moment in time, you’ll consider ditching your smartphone.
God speed that day.