By doing less than most modern conventional smartphones, the Minimal Phone promises to give you back some of your life. I want the Minimal Phone now!
Much as I
hate to admit it, my life has been taken over by my smartphone. I’m a slave to
an innocuous, 6.5-inch slab of glass and metal. It’s a pocketable supercomputer
that allows me to make phone calls (both voice and video calls), access emails,
take photographs and instantly share those with whoever I want to, send and
receive text messages, photos and videos, make and receive payments instantly
(I hardly ever carry cash these days), do all my online shopping, help me
navigate across the city, book cabs, flights and hotel rooms… the list is
endless. The sheer range of things that a modern smartphone will allow you to
do is nothing short of astonishing.
I was a tech journalist until the early-2000s and used to write about computers
and technology. This was 25 years ago and if someone had
suggested at that time that there would, in the future, be a small,
pocketable device – a 'smartphone' – that would allow you to do all of what I’ve
mentioned above, I would have probably thought the idea quite preposterous.
After all, I was still going to a PCO (anyone remember those?) to make
international calls in the early-1990s, when I was in Bareilly. By the
late-1990s I had moved to Bombay, started working as tech writer for CHIP
magazine and subsequently started using a Nokia 5110, my very first mobile
phone. Making and receiving calls was still prohibitively expensive back then,
and I used that phone sparingly. Gradually, call rates dropped over the years and
the ancient 5110 was replaced by the sleek little Nokia 8210, but usage was still
restricted to only making and receiving phone calls, and sending and receiving
text messages.
