sonoko The funny thing about the photos situation is that despite having a camera on me at all times (phone, of course), I barely even have any pictures of myself or my friends. Sometimes I think of taking some, but I don't want to interrupt the moment or be the annoying one always asking to take a picture every single time.
It's quite ironic to me that half the pictures we take end up in a "view once" whatsapp message, without keeping any of the memories of the moment, just to share an absurd picture of what we did at that time. I hope this situation changes for me and I start being more active about this, digicam or not. Because one day we'll be old and we will regret not having anything to show our kids.
sonoko If/when you try the smartphoneless life, please chronicle your experiences here. I am intensely interested in the same thing,
I'll keep using my phone in my everyday life until at least summer. Unfortunately, I'm required to use my phone to upload some tasks in class, and I sometimes have to check my uni email on the go to check if there's an urgent message like a class cancellation.
However, that doesn't mean that I haven't taken my first steps, such as doing some research on which phone to switch to, how to manage some of the things I use daily, and trying some things out.
For now, the plan is to switch to a Punkt MP02, which is a dumbphone with signal support (AFAIK SMS cost money here, so that's not fun). The downsides (or upsides for some) are that there's no music player, no proper calendar, no sideloading, and the biggest con of all is that the signal client is quite unreliable sometimes (goes down often, hell, it's been down for weeks now), so I'm kinda having trouble justifying my choice here.
I'm planning on seeing how they handle the signal situation during the time I'm forced to use a smartphone, and then depending on that I'm either getting the punkt or going for something else.
Meanwhile, I've bought a second hand iPod mini (it's on its way here!) and some IEMs to replace my music player (phone), wrote my daily uni schedule and my calendar events on my pocket notebook to replace my phone's timetable/calendar, and same thing for tasks. Email I could check on my laptop as long as my future dumbphone supports tethering (not all of them do, but the one I've been eyeing does), and I could probably build some sort of signal bot in my home server to check for some quick info (stuff like a weather overview in my area, whether my bus has been delayed or not, etc). Still trying to figure out how to make it possible with signal-cli and a group chat with myself or something.
I'll keep you updated with more news if I have any, or perhaps we could even create a thread dedicated to smartphone free life, and how we replace the things we're used to do with our phones nowadays
