How I survived a week without an iPhone and learnt to look up again

Almost five hours a day — that’s how long I spent looking at my smartphone. Something had to change, could a retro-inspired ‘dumb phone’ be the answer?

I was spending almost five hours a day on my phone before I tried the Nokia 3210.

Almost five hours a day — that’s how long I spent on my phone. Something had to change, at least to save my neck from the dreaded ‘tech hump’.

And something did change just before Christmas last year. It arrived in a golden package, which immediately reminded me of the golden era of telecommunications.

The Nokia 3210 was an amazing device when the Finnish company launched it in the early 2000s. Built like a tank, so much so, I remember washing the dishes one evening, and my copy of the phone fell from the top pocket of my shirt into the sink. I fished it out, thinking I had cooked it.

The rebooted Nokia 3210, a throwback from the Y2K era.

But, to my surprise when I switched it on the next morning, it sprung back to life — albeit with a temperamental 0 button.

So I was keen to try the reboot of the phone by HMD, which has warned about the “evil loop of dopamine” smartphones generate.

Mainly, to see if I could wean myself off my smartphone and if what is essentially a replica of a 25-year-old device could make it in the 2020s.

Well here’s the executive summary, after a week using the device my daily screen time was slashed to 17 minutes.

Why? Because the phone is virtually unusable, so much so it forces you to change your digital habits — and that’s a good thing.

Last year, I wrote a column about Anthony Albanese’s ban on children accessing social media, which I argued would be ineffective without us adults considering such a ban ourselves.

The problem with that is smartphones are too damn smart. They’re like Pandora’s box, a genie escaping from the bottle, or a packet of Pringles. Once you pop, you can’t stop.

They are designed to be addictive. Music producer Giles Martin reckons they will be likened to smoking in coming years after people wise up. I reckon that analogy is apt now.

The original Nokia 3210 — which could survive being dropped in a sink.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. After all, with a smartphone, you have the world at your fingertips. A former colleague of mine when I worked at The Age, Jesse Hogan — brilliant journo — said his grandmother called it his answer book. Google is instantly accessible, anything you want to know, punch it in your phone and it will spit out an answer.

But, spending almost five hours a day looking at my phone stops me from looking up, from watching my three-year-old son grow, connecting with my wife, family or giving my two little dogs the love and attention they deserve.

It’s not completely the device’s fault. I find it a barometer of how stressed I am. There is a correlation between my stress levels and the need to distract myself via a screen.

And most of those five hours are spent on work-related tasks. I remember when I first had my work email installed on my phone around 2011. I thought it was a novelty, then it quickly became a curse, blurring work and home life.

An example was when I wrote a story about the late Geoffrey Edelsten when he decided to sell his clinics. It was a largely positive story, but I wrote in one paragraph near the top of the story Geoffrey had witnessed highs from owning the Sydney Swans to lows such as serving jail time for soliciting notorious hit man Christopher Dale Flannery to bash one of his patients.

Geoffrey took umbrage at that line. But, I didn’t feel his wrath until more than 24 hours after publication, when I returned to work from an annual leave day and saw the ‘red light of danger’ on my landline phone in the office. Geoffrey had left about eight voice messages, his anger escalating with each one.

Now, of course, I receive such feedback instantly — even when on annual leave or in the middle of the night — like when an ABC PR demanded a correction to a story I wrote when I was a media writer at the Australian Financial Review (and yet the ABC complains when our media writers call them for comment on weekends). I digress.

With instantaneous connectivity, smartphones fuel an always-on mentality. That’s toxic. It’s bad for your central nervous system and a recipe for burnout.

HMD has rebooted the Nokia 3210. But, can it replace an iPhone?

So was the Nokia 3210 the digital detox I needed? Strangely, I waited until I was on annual leave between Christmas and New Year to try it out — I was afraid I’d miss out on a scoop.

The Nokia is pretty much like the original. It works best for taking calls only. You can text, but navigating the tangible keys rather than an on screen keyboard makes composing a message so cumbersome you wonder how we got by 20 years ago, and more often than not I found myself throwing in the towel and not sending a message at all.

As for emails, the good news is it doesn’t support them. There is a web browser, but it’s so clunky you don’t bother using it. There is no Instagram to scroll mindlessly through. It supports Facebook, but the app is slow to the point of being useless, besides, I unplugged Facebook almost 15 years ago because I found it a time waster and the antipathy to a healthy mind.

But, the 3210 does come with the game snake — another time waster but it evokes a sense of nostalgia for simpler times. It also comes with a 2MP rear camera, delivering similar quality to a Fujifilm Instax mini. But, taking photos will quickly sap your memory.

For me, I found the 3210 spent most of the time on the kitchen bench. I only used it when I had to call someone or return calls (I had a lot of missed calls because it was on silent).

After a week using the Nokia 3210, I returned to using an iPhone — but with some changes.

I also found that by not constantly checking a smartphone, my attention span improved. I was not endlessly distracted, or found myself checking my emails to see if have missed something (I have more than 99,999 unread emails).

But, such bliss was not to last. Within a week, I had maxed out the phone’s 128MB of memory from the few text messages I had managed to send. As a journalist, when I returned from leave, I also had to make sure I was connected and available to report on the world we live in.

It’s funny we need screens to do that, and I had a chuckle that on top of my contacts, I still have a number for AAP Copytakers, a service journos used to phone in stories as late as the early 2010s.

The 3210 still left a mark on me. I realised I don’t need a dumb phone to force me to change my digital ways. I can still be present with a smart phone — I just don’t need it in my pocket every second of the day.

Like the 3210, it can stay on the kitchen bench during the evenings and weekends. A smart phone shouldn’t be at the dinner table — or any device for that matter.

This little phone was a wake up call and reminder the most important things in life are beyond a screen.

Originally published as How I survived a week without an iPhone and learnt to look up again