social.noyu.me

so, four months ago i got a new smartphone. i was excited to have a fully-working, modern, usable device.

then a bit less than three months after getting it, i smashed the screen absentmindedly, and had to send it off for repair

so in the meantime i had to use this other phone:

using that as my only phone for a week, or however long it was, made me wish i seriously could use this thing — the Cat S22 Flip — as my primary phone.

not because it's a great smartphone. but because it's a terrible one. the bare minimum specs and tiny screen are anti-addictive

it provides the uh, “digital existence minimum”? i live in a country where apps are not optional, i need the authentication app and person-to-person payments app, my life is easier with the public transport ticket app, and of course chat apps. a featurephone is not an option here

now look at these side by side. (for your reference, the phone on the left is a little less wide than the one on the right, and much taller when unfolded)

the phone on the left displays too little of the twitter timeline

the phone on the right displays too much

the phone on the right there is a Sony Xperia 10 VI. i bought it specifically because it has the smallest screen of any fully modern Android phone. if you own an Android phone bought new in the last few years, its screen is almost certainly bigger.

and yet it's still Too Big.

i don't know how to express this because it's something i feel viscerally rather than “think”, but i really think modern smartphone screens can display too much information now. they can take up more than twice as much of the visual field but deliver no more value. it's painful

this single thing makes me regret buying the phone more than anything else. i know i am fairly negative towards social media these days, but it's so bad on a phone with a “modern” screen size (compared to, say, an iPhone SE) that i have to adopt an zero-tolerance policy

but i am not complaining about being able to take photos with better than webcam quality!

i should explain why i “can't” use Cat S22 Flip as my main phone

honestly: i can!… mostly. it runs all the essential apps, it makes phone calls… but it's stuck on Android 11, SMS don't always come through, photos are very bad, and the dialpad is plagued by double-triggering

@hikari Damn that's disappointing, I've been thinking about getting one of those phones

Have you seen the Unihertz Jelly phones? They seem like they'd fit that niche pretty well https://www.unihertz.com/collections/jelly-series

@scathach was not familiar with those, no! seems kind of neat, i feel like if i'm going out of my way to get a weird phone like that i'd rather it be one with a removable battery though

@hikari Yeahhh idk if anyone even makes removable battery phones anymore :/

@scathach @hikari go to the dollar general, lots of options there

@scathach well there's the fairphone for one but