Early bird: Can BRICK-ing our Smartphones make them RETRO again? Brick! #DigitalDetox
Added 2023-07-14 02:47:56 +0000 UTCI was going to put out something else this week but this item came in and I just had to share a little video about it.
You see I’ve been investigating for a while now how to make using a mobile phone more enjoyable again. I don’t know about you but I’ve found myself a bit of a slave to a boring looking carbon copy rectangle of plastic.
But remember when phones were truly interesting designs? I really miss Nokia… although they’re still around in a way (more on that soon!). And other brands too.
Let’s see if Brick-ing your smartphone can make it enjoyable again! Let me know what you think!
Video: https://youtu.be/eJz2GBZzo5M
Thank you for your ongoing support 👍🕹️
Your friend in retro, Perifractic
Comments
Yes you can uninstall the app and reinstall it to unbrick everything. The downside is you have to set up all the chosen one apps again. So doable but a deterrent. You can do the same thing to reset the emergency unlocks. But paying is a good idea. You should suggest it! In my view once I need an emergency unlock I’ll either decide to permanently unlock that app or rework my habits so I don’t need that again. I’ve actually been playing with various old phones to see what I realistically can go back to. I do love flipphones. There are some modern options. More soon! And you’re so right about those parents. That’s exactly what I’ve seen too and I immediately knew I didn’t want to become that. 🙏
Perifractic's Retro Recipes
2023-07-16 18:14:44 +0000 UTCYeah, I totally agree with this, John. In fact, I had this very thought while watching the video. The phone feature for a lot of us has become secondary. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve probably made less than 10 proper phone calls so far this year on my “phone”, with the majority of my communication through iMessage, E-mail, or other means. I remember when the iPod Touch came out and people said it was like an iPhone, just without the phone. At the time, given how I was using my iPhone, I remember thinking it was more like an iPod Touch just with added phone functionality.
Karl Botragyi
2023-07-15 21:58:57 +0000 UTCWhat an interesting idea. I love the implementation through Apple's ScreenTime. That's very elegant, and will ensure any restrictions will automatically carry over to your other Apple devices too. I see this problem of "unplugging" so much now I'm a dad. Often, when I'm out at parties with Adriana, I see kids trying to talk to their parents. The parents are buried in their phones and responding with a yes or no, while not really listening to anything their kids are saying, and it's difficult to watch. There's definitely a real need for this kind of thing - in specific situations. One of those situations, for me, is work. Now so many of us are doing hybrid working, it's so easy to reach for the iPhone/iPad just to "check something out" when I should really be working, only to realise 30 minutes later that I've disappeared down an Amazon or YouTube rabbit hole and will need to work after hours to catch up on the time I've missed (which I do, honestly ... sometimes ... ahem). A couple of things I'm unsure about though: First, what happens if the brick is lost/stolen and you've used up all of your emergency unlocks? Is the phone permanently bricked until you do a factory reset in that scenario, or is uninstalling the app/turning off ScreenTime enough to work around the problem? Second, I'm not sure about the lifetime limit on the emergency unlock feature. It's a tough nut to crack, but I wonder if that could've been implemented differently? My first thought was to require an incredibly long password to avoid those "I'll just quickly check this" urges, and while this would work as a useful deterrent in non-emergencies, entering a long password is not something you'd want to do in a real emergency. Also, what happens when you hit the limit? Do you have to buy another brick, throwing the old one away, request an account reset, or something else? If so, paying to get 5 emergency unlocks back might be a more sensible (although understandly more difficult to swallow alternative). Having to pay, again, would be a useful deterrent. Although, if you can just work around as I speculated above, then I suspect I'm opening a can of worms here. I feel this functionality needs to be designed in at the OS-level, as if workarounds exist then that invites temptations that will ultimately result in people starting to work around the inconvenience at times, ending up with it disabled/uninstalled entirely at some point in the future. But maybe I'm being too pessimistic here. Brick is certainly a positive thing! A very accurate observation on the current state of mobile phones these days too. That's not something I've considered, but there was so much more experimentation before the iPhone came along and changed the landscape. There's a bit more experimentation on the Android side of the fence, which is nice to see, but even with all of the foldables, slide-up selfie cameras, and below-screen fingerprint readers, most phones pretty much all look the same these days. Next video: Perifractic rocking a Hello Kitty-themed retro phone, just to be different. On a slightly different note, one thing I miss with phones in particular is the ruggedness. Most of us baby our phones more these days, due to their fragility (and cost). That old Nokia you had in the video, while it's not a rugged phone per-se, it's still not one I'd personally baby. I'd throw it in my bag and just not worry about it. But, when I got my iPhone 14 Pro Max, the first thing I did was spend £40 on a case and screen protector - both of which were installed before I'd even set the thing up! Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone and would be totally lost without it, but back in the day these devices were closer to the "tool" end of the spectrum, rather than something a lot of us treat with kid gloves these days. I guess, in my case, some of that comes from Adriana often dropping my phone. Seriously, she's like Chunk from The Goonies. I can hand her something, start a 5 second countdown, and nine times out of ten it's crashing to the floor before I've hit zero! Start thinking about rugged shells for your C64/Amiga now, Peri, as Babyfractic will be like a bull in a china shop in a couple of years! Now, just make sure you don't go buy yourself a Palm Organiser to replace some of the missing functionality. Remember those? They were lovely!
Karl Botragyi
2023-07-15 21:52:32 +0000 UTCThis video is just more reinforcement of something I've been saying for years--modern cell phones are not phones. They're ultra-portable computers with phone functionality bolted on as essentially an afterthought. Especially now that the phone portion is stuff like Voice over LTE, i.e. a data stream instead of an actual audio stream.
John Bailey
2023-07-15 21:46:11 +0000 UTC
