I think the ones using only "dumbphones" are also the people who don't like companies influencing them. Also the market is already saturated. I get good "dumbphones" for less than 10€. An adult can basically get a new phone everyday.
It's really bad, not more people will be using them. My phone has a browser with a cursor(!), and the equivalents of Google Maps and Spotify, that also (would) work offline. But I can't use them because the servers are down.
I always wonder what a smartphone really brings to a table besides a touch screen, better camera and faster chips. In terms of UX it seams worse.
I haven’t used a flip phones since 2007. Is there a model I can look up to see what the UX is like today, if it’s not just Android?
From the flip phones of old, the iPhone (first gen) was a massive upgrade in terms of UX, imo. A lot of people avoided smart phones, because they thought they’d be too hard to use, but I think they were actually much easier for the basics. That may be less true today than it once was, as they’ve added a lot of complexity over the last 18 years.
Oh, I was actually talking about a phone from that era, which is my daily driver. Most functionality can be reached by ~3 button presses, which is from the finger movement equivalent to a single swipe. Also I can type and call without looking.
My perspective is that there aren't really any new apps, just new companies in place of the old apps, so that my phone doesn't really have less features besides performance due to Moore's law.
To me an Apple Watch with cellular would be the perfect "phone" if Apple didn't make it so dependent on also having an iPhone. It is a device that lets you do all the important stuff of a phone but without the temptation to doom scroll endlessly through social media. My only complaints are that you can't run CarPlay off of it and the battery life only lasts a day or so.
With AI, you could get probably get useful information off your watch comparable to browsing the web.
And the watch doesn't have a camera, but once you have a small digital camera that fits in your pocket or purse you will quickly find smartphone cameras are shit anyway. They actually have been for years due to excessive computational photography.
It's really bad, not more people will be using them. My phone has a browser with a cursor(!), and the equivalents of Google Maps and Spotify, that also (would) work offline. But I can't use them because the servers are down.
I always wonder what a smartphone really brings to a table besides a touch screen, better camera and faster chips. In terms of UX it seams worse.