jonathan.beckett@gmail.com

One Week Into the Nokia 3310 Experiment

It is now a week since the Nokia 3310 arrived, and I performed a factory reset on my previous phone (a rather lovely Honor 8 that now resides in my other half’s handbag). I thought it might be interesting to record a few thoughts about my experiences so far.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that I have not missed having a smartphone in my pocket that much. This may be because I have not traveled anywhere yet, so had no need for information while out and about. When I travel with work I will of course have my work phone with me (a Google Nexus 5X), so it’s a bit of a moot point.

I used to listen to podcasts while cycling to and from work (I have about a six mile commute each day) – I hadn’t really given them a thought until writing this. To be honest it will probably save my ears – wind noise causes you to crank the volume up a lot to hear the spoken word – it’s amazing how loud ambient noise is on a busy road.

There have been moments when I reached for my pocket to take a photo of something – which would normally have been posted to Instagram. Each time I’ve done it, I’ve been reminded how much disposable content people post across Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, and smiled at my own idiocy. I still love photography though, so bought a point-and-shoot digital camera, and have resurrected an old Flickr account – I will be adding a few well curated photos to it from time to time, rather than posting from a phone like some kind of photographic machine gunner.

The reality is that I sit in front of a computer almost all day, either at work or at home, so not having a smartphone in my pocket really makes very little difference. If I want to use Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress, or whatever else, I will pull them up in a browser. I won’t miss paying with NFC because I have a bank card in my pocket. I won’t miss Google Maps because I’ll figure out where I’m going before I leave – you know, like we did for generations before smartphones arrived.

Don’t get me wrong – smartphones have their place, and they are tremendously useful gadgets – but when they result in everybody shuffling along footpaths in town centres like automatons, consumed in their own private data feeds, it feels like something has gone very, very wrong.