So, after like 8 months of dumbphone only, I’ve given up.
It wasn’t one majorly annoying thing, but just a non-stop death by a thousand cuts. Modern life really requires at least possession of one of these stupid little rectangles, and if you don’t have one, you get slowly nibbled to death by the ducks of modernity.
So, rather than redouble my efforts to bend the world to dealing with me wanting to be a bit of a luddite weirdo, I’ve given up and just… bought an iPhone SE and paired it with an Apple Watch 8 I already had.
See, the thing I really didn’t consider is that I pretty much already had the ideal dumbphone: this AW8 is a cellular version.
It does phone calls, text messages, and has sufficient ties to modern services (music, podcasts, audiobooks, maps, etc.) that it is, by itself, a 60% solution. And just for perfect clarity: there’s a lot of things wrong with the watch that make it not an ideal device, with the biggest one being really not fantastic battery life.
For everything the watch doesn’t do, I also have the phone, but the phone isn’t strictly required, and I can simply leave it at home when I don’t want to deal with all the modern smartness and just rely on the watch.
For sure, it’s not a cheap solution since an iPhone and a cellular watch is a giant investment even if you go for the “cheapest” versions, and I’m paying for two cellular plans (though, with US Mobile it’s $96/year for each so, relatively speaking, still pretty cheap).
been looking at them for awhile to cut our phone costs. how do you like 'em, and which ‘network’ do you use?
I’m using their T-Mobile rebrand, and it’s just as good as T-Mobile ever was, excepting you don’t get any 5G access.
Though, tbh, I don’t care, since I’m paying $5 a month for 500 minutes, 500 texts, and 500mb of data. 5G would be a total waste since, I mean, even the 4G stuff can eat all my data allocation in like 30 seconds anyways.
when gramma’s house got wired for internet last summer, we were able to dump the mobile hotspot she was using at home for internet (which was practically unusable because the signal there is basically non-existent the last few years) to get our bill “down” to “only” $130. 3 handhelds and an adapter thing you can connect normal phones to. a whole 8 or 10gb of pooled data included in that. vzn is really generous here.
it’d be $46 with these guys for the same lines and gigs ($36 total a month for the handhelds, and $120 a year for the adapter), but we might have to get new gear all around except for mine (volte flipper bought at retail, unlocked and supposed to work with all three carriers). i like that new feature where we can try the carriers out and easily switch a line (or all) from one to another if one isn’t working where we need it to.
what does the cid come up as when calling a landline with name&number cid? just ‘wireless’ and number or somesuch like some cell phones, the billing name (like others–what we don’t want. we use a line as a business line), or can you customize the names that show up with the number?