Phone ranting

cmccabe had a bit of a rant about his workplace forcibly replacing

his Blackberry with an iPhone[1]. A lot of it struck a chord with me

(despite not actually having used either of those devices) and part

of me wanted to reply. Another part of me doesn't like writing more

than two sentences about phones because I feel like it gives them

more attention and energy than the things deserve, but I guess the

rant-happy part of me has won out today. I'll keep it shortish,

though.

(Haha, yeah, right)

I use a Samsung smartphone which is now pushing six years old, a

hand-me-down from a family member. Recently its battery started to

reach end of life, with the final 30% or even 40% of its capacity

likely to disappear in an instant it placed under any kind of

significant load. This is not the first time this has happened, and

in the past I've just bought a new battery for it and kept on

trucking. But now the phone is also old enough that it is no longer

officially supported by LineageOS. I started to wonder if it was

finally time to replace it.

Smartphone shopping in 2019 for any sensible human being is grim,

bleak, post-apocalyptic stuff. I have too much self respect to ever

buy a phone without a user-replacable battery or one without a 3.5mm

headphone jack. Let's be reasonble, please. This alright eliminates

a good chunk of the market. I also won't do anything as silly as run

the vendor-supplied stock Android full of uninstallable bloatware and

worse, and be forced to tie the phone to a Google account. So it

needs to have good LineageOS support. Not "some guy in a forum

reported it to work after an intricate and poorly-documented

procedure" support, but rather "there is a manufacturer-approved

unlocking procedure and a detailed install guide at ilneageos.org"

support. Call me a coward, but I'm not going to unbox something that

cost me hundreds of credits and then immediately start doing things

which will best-case void my warranty and worst-case brick the thing.

The whole undertaking seemed so futile that I started to seriously

wonder, as I have before[2], about switching to a "feature phone". I

went as far as looking at display models in a store. I picked up a

Nokia 216 DS, pressed an actual, honest-to-God physical button with

tacticle feedback and was immediately struck, lightning-like, with

supreme insight:

This is how phone interfaces should be.

cmccabe is right to fear he will never recover his physical keyboard

typing speed on a touch screen, because he won't. Or, if he does, it

will only be by standing still, craning his neck and using both hands

at once. In contrast, in the suppoedly "bad old days", it was

nothing at all for me to compose an SMS at high speed and high

accuracy with my hand and phone inside my jacket pocket to protect it

from rain, with my head upright and eyes ahead so I could safely

cross the street. Touchscreens are a massive interface regression,

but we've committed to them so hard in such a short time we can't, as

a society, openly admit it without being embarrassed.

Playing with the Nokia also reminded me how fantastically transparent

and discoverable purely menu-based software interfaces can be.

Touchscreens, by giving every individual app developer a blank slate

with regards to interface, also completely destroyed generations of

convention, with the result that it's now often impossible to know

how to use phone software. You literally have to just experiment

with random swipes until some part of the screen which gave no

indication of being movable happens to move and uncover some

previously invisible interface behind it. I still occasionally

discover useful things by accident in apps I have used for years.

The idea that a ticket back to the not-that-distant world where

phones were actually usable cost only 35EUR was hugely enticing. I

decided to get one, only to be foiled by the fact that, despite

having it on display, the store didn't actually have them physically

in stock. I was told that ordering it online myself would be less

hassle than trying to get the store to order one in for me. For

various logistical reasons which are far too boring to go into, I

ended up not doing this, and when I later found out that a

co-worker's partner worked in a battery store I ended up getting a

cheap replacement battery for my old Samsung sent right to my door.

So, it will live for a few years more. Who knows how awful the smart

phone market will be when this time rolls around again. Who knows

how feasible it will be to live without one in 2021? Already in many

parts of the world it means accepting e.g. substantially increased

prices for public transport.

I don't expect it to ever become widely acknowledged that touch

screens are a technological backward step, but I am surprised to see

that it is apparently becoming popular for hard-core smartphone users

to buy little adhesive thingies that look kind of like doorknobs to

attach to the back of their phone. This makes them much easier to

securely hold with one hand. I am glad that we can at least

apparently now publically admit, after over a decade, that

smartphones are ergonomically shit on top of all their other

failings.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~cmccabe/11-producer-to-consumer.txt

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/dumbphone-dilemma.txt