My last three phones

As some of the people reading know, I had a flip phone (a Kyocera DuraXTP, to be precise) until late December 2021.

I was, and still am, on a family phone plan. When the rest of my family switched to smartphones, I went with a flip phone because smartphones were much more expensive and I was poor. But after a while, as cheap(er) smartphones became available, it became sort of a combination of wanting to see just how long I can survive with a flip phone in an increasingly smartphone-orientated world, being leery of just how easy it is to get drawn into social media/internet when you have a browser in your pocket. And, in recent years, I also grew leery of participating in the certain aspects of smartphone-centric world. For example, rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft are built on labor exploitation and investor subsidies, and I could neatly avoid all the moral quandaries that come with using apps by having a phone that didn’t support them. I liked having my transit passes on physical cards and buying (or printing out) physical tickets. And, like I said, I just didn’t like the thought of being connected to the Internet all the time. It may seem counterintuitive, given that I’m a journalist, but I appreciated the fact that, when took the ‘L’ train, the lack of onboard wi-fi forced me to disconnect and gave me a respite from work concerns, even if for less than an hour.

Now, in a bit that’s going to be a recurring motif in this post, I should mention that my mom got less and less amused by my choice the longer this went on. She would never go so far as to tell me to get a smartphone already, in those exact words, but she made her displeasure known. In 2018, when my phone screen suddenly stopped working and I had to get a new phone, I was almost resigned to getting a smartphone. But my mom kept gloating how I would “finally be joining the 21^st century,” and I ended up getting a flip phone out of sheer spite. Which is how I got the Kyocera.

The Kyocera

I would have stuck with the Kyocera – but my carrier’s (T-Mobile’s) decision to sunset its 3G networks forced my hand.

I did some research and discovered that, since the last time I seriously looked at what’s out there, a whole new class of phone emerged. The feature phone wasn’t fully “smart,” but it had more features than my Kyocera. They had apps (of sorts), such as YouTube and Google Assistant, and some of them could work as wi-fi hotspots. I was even surprised to realize that there were smart phones that were shaped like flip phones (more on that quite a bit later).

When I went to get a new phone at the T-Mobile store (literal days before the deadline), I was offered two free upgrade options – the Alcatel Go Flip feature phone and a Samsung Galaxy A32 5G smartphone. And it’s not like the store employees pressured me – quite the opposite, in fact. But two things ultimately nudged me toward choosing the second option.

One, in the novel I’ve been working on for years and years now, I could justify some characters not using smartphones, but I couldn’t justify most characters not using them – and I figured that, if I’m going to write about smartphones, I should get some first-hand experience with them. Two, I just kept thinking that my editor at Austin Weekly News, who hasn’t been amused that I keep using an old flip phone in the year of our Lord 2021, would be even less amused if I had a chance to get a free smartphone and didn’t use it.

So I compromised with myself. I was going to use a smartphone for six months, see if I like it. If I didn’t… well, I would now have a working SIM card that I can put into a feature phone. I even had a model in mind – a Nokia 6300 4G. It had YouTube and Google Maps, it had 4G, it had an e-mail client, and it could function as a wi-fi hotspot. While I liked getting a respite from Twitter and e-mails, the realities of journalism meant that, sometimes, having to connect on the go was necessary.

Things didn’t work out that way.

In the real world will my full-fledged smartphone

The Samsung

In the interest of fairness, I will start with the positives, many of which surprised me. The call quality was objectively better on my Samsung than it was on my Kyocera, to the point where it kind of freaked me out at first. While I had some issues with the on-screen keyboard (more on that further down), one indisputable upside was that I could type in Cyrillic on it, something that the Kyocera didn’t allow. I really came to appreciate being able to drop Russian words in my texts to my sister. The Samsung camera was objectively better than the Kyocera camera, which was rudimentary at best. Having a device I could stream music on was, I admit, I nice bonus. There was something to be said about flipping through Instagram on an app, on the screen the social media platform was designed for. And, as the war in Ukraine began, I came to appreciate the ability to have the Telegram app at my fingertips.

My mom, I think, believed that I would come to like it as I got to see all of Samsung’s functions. But, to her frustration, there are certain phone functions I deliberately ignored, and she wasn’t amused that I wouldn’t “use the phone properly.”

I didn’t install any ride-share apps, because, well, the fact that I could didn’t make my moral objections go away. I deliberately didn’t install any social media apps (other than the aforementioned Instagram and Telegram). Viewing Twitter on the browser meant I didn’t get push notifications, so I was less tempted to check it, and I simply never used Facebook on a phone (even on the browser). I ended up installing Ventra, the transit app for the Chicagoland region, in order to try to buy Metra commuter rail tickets en rote to the station, but I had so much trouble buying Metra tickets on it that, at one point, I nearly threw a phone in frustration .

I didn’t use it on CTA and Pace, because, well, I had a perfectly functional physical card, and I kept thinking about how my mom had to pause a call just to swipe in, which just seemed like a hassle.

(It didn’t help that, back in April, when my family and I visited my brother in Washington D.C., I remember family members standing in the airport with their phones, trying to install and register for he local transit app, and I just kept thinking – wouldn’t it be easier to just buy a card from the vending machine? It’s what I ended up doing)

I’ve long been paranoid about online banking. I avoided (and still avoid) doing something as simple as checking my account balance unless I can connect to a password-protected networks. Paying with an app, or transferring money with the app, just didn’t feel safe. And, again, watching my mom struggle to find the right app to pay for certain things just made me think – wouldn’t it be easier to use a physical card?

Which does kind of dovetail at one thing that kept driving me crazy about using a smartphone – the lack of physical things to press. Accepting a call suddenly became a chore, one that tying the function to pressing volume rocker only somewhat fixed. While the Samsung had a better camera, I didn’t use it much, because, every time I did, the lack of a shutter button made me feel clumsy. A physical button on a camera was straight-forward, direct, responsive, but when I touched the screen, it felt like the phone could slip out of my hand any second, and it just didn’t have that immediate response the button had.

Texting felt clumsy, too. Having the full-fledged keyboard as opposed to T9 number pad dialing was faster, but it felt like I kept on missing keys (activating autocomplete somewhat fixed that problem). And I was surprised just how much I missed having keys that gave physical feedback. I ended up activating the option where the phone vibrates when I hit the on-screen keys just to have something.

And then, there is the battery power thing. After having a flip phone for almost two decades, I was not prepared for how quickly smartphones lose their charge. Forget having the charge for 2-3 days – it seemed to lose charge by evening. Once, when I was so tired I just kind of conked out, I woke up to find the phone’s battery almost completely drained, which never happened with any phones I had before. More then once, I found myself asking – why do smartphone users tolerate this?

What kind of cemented it for me was a time back in June, when I was covering a long meeting and had to use my Samsung as a wi-fi hotspot to live-tweet. I ended up nearly draining the battery, and I found myself thinking that this is not just a design flaw. This gets in the way of my work.

It didn’t help that I remember riding the ‘L’, seeing people stare at similar-looking smartphones and… growing up amid the collapse of the Soviet Union gave me some weird baggage, which manifests itself in some surprising, sometimes contradictory ways, which is why I found myself thinking – do I really want to be part of the collective? Do I really want to be just like everybody else?

Buying a (smart) flip phone in 2022

Like I said before, my initial plan was to try the smartphone out and, if I didn’t like it, switch to a Nokia. But as the self-imposed deadline approached, I started having second thoughts. Like I said, I liked being able to switch back and forth between Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, and I could never get a straight answer about whether Nokia even supported Cyrillic, let alone Cyrillic texting. It didn’t have Telegram – just a Telegram emulator, which felt… iffy. And the more time passed, the more leery I felt of the candybar phone and its potential to butt-dial stuff. Say what one will about flip phones, but the design neatly takes care of that problem.

I did some research, and my thoughts kept returning to one of the options I considered when I originally had to give up my Kyocera – the CAT S22 Flip. It was built by Bullitt Group under license with Caterpillar construction equipment manufacturer as part of its line of rugged phones – tough phones that could withstand rigors of things like construction work, logging and farming, Some of those phones have candybar designs, some are traditional smartphones. CAT S22 Flip is the only one that looks like a flip phone – but It was smarter than the likes of the Alcatel and the Nokia. It kind of reminded me of Japanese keitai phones – smart phones shaped like flip phones, which are popular in Japan and Korea but never caught on in the Western countries.

The CAT S22 Flip had a physical keyboard I was looking for, but it also ran Android 11 Go edition, which meant access to standard Google apps and the apps I wanted. That meant access to Google multilingual keyboard. And, since my tendency to break electronics is legendary in my family, the whole “tough enough to handle all kinds of damage” definitely appealed to me. While Bullitt/Caterpillar never promised “classic” flip phone type battery life, the reports suggested it was better than Samsung’s. And at the time, at least, it was only available on T-Mobile (in United States). It seemed that the stars were aligned.

By that point, I started earning more money than I have in quite some time… or ever, really. And, by June, my mind was made up. I was going to save money and buy it in the end of September, as a birthday present to myself. But, once again, circumstances outside my control interfered.

The family plan I’m on was carried over from Sprint. As part of the ongoing integration into T-Mobile network, everyone on the family plan got new SIM cards a the tail end of August. And I thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that CAT S22 Flip required a larger SIM card than a nanoSIM my Samsung had. So I decided to go to a T-Mobile store and get the phone with the right-sized SIM.

Actually getting that done was… interesting. I went into a T-Mobile store in downtown Evanston, and the sales clerk told me that CAT S22 didn’t exist. I showed him a page on T-Mobile’s official website on my Samsung, which is when, without missing a beat, he said that they didn’t have one of those.

After that, I figured out how to look up which stores had which specific models in stock. I found out that only one store near me (the one in the shopping plaza by the Howard ‘L’ station) had any, and even then, only a handful.

When I eventually made it there, I was told that they had to check if they had any in their vault (!). I waited patiently, and they did. The store employee who assisted me stared at the phone with genuine curiosity.

“I’m not sure I know how to activate one of those,” he admitted in a mix of concern and awe, and his eyebrows shot up as he hit the keys and an on-screen keyboard pop up.

It took some doing, and, because he wanted to make sure the phone could make calls first and foremost, he rushed through some of the synching, but it worked, and it even transferred over a decent chunk of my text exchanges on the Samsung.

I field-tested the phone by calling Anna. I admit that I didn’t call my mom until the following day, just because I didn’t want to deal with the disappointment and the judgement.

When I did call her the next day my mom, who doesn’t want to follow Grandma Nina’s footsteps and be judgy about her children’s choices, put on a brave face and dutifully said that it was fine, really. But, just last month, in a fit of frustration, she referred to the phone as a “кошмарик” (basically “little horror”), and lamented that I didn’t have Google Maps on it, even though I told her it was running Android and she knew for a fact that I could post stuff on Instagram from it. Which, I suppose, just goes to show you that even usually reasonable people can be blinded by their biases.

A flipping smart phone

CAT S22 Flip