Clawing back some time

In my continued effort to claw back my time, I’m trying to go back to using a feature phone. Over the past couple of years, I’d slid back into smart phone usage primarily because I needed to communicate by text with the neighborhood moms to coordinate kids’ activities. My feature phone would often garble their emoticon-ridden texts to the point of incomprehensibility. So I went back to a smart phone, and next thing you know I’m walking around with headphones on listening to podcasts and checking Twitter all day.

Recently I researched the latest developments wrt to dumb phones and found an interesting contender, called the Light Phone II.

One of the key features for me is the QWERTY keyboard since T9 is prohibitively slow.

Sample text from neigborhood mom

In addition, it can serve as a wifi hotspot.

However, I mostly like it because of what it lacks:

  • Bloatware/adware
  • Web browser
  • Any capability to run “apps”

It does have some problems:

  • Battery life is not great
  • Bluetooth is really buggy
  • The UI can be sluggish - which is odd for such a simple UI

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