Breaking smartphone addiction: 10 Designs to save us from electronic enslavement - Yanko Design

I read a pretty scary statistic online, which outlines that the average person stares at their smartphone screen for a minimum of iii hours a day. In fact, that number went from 0.3 hours to three.3 hours between 2008 and 2017. Today, it's anywhere between 4-6 hours, which is anywhere around thirty% of the fourth dimension we spend awake. That's thirty% of our waking life spent staring at pixels. Mike Elgan points out that if we spent that fourth dimension reading books, we could literally read up of 200 books PER Twelvemonth.

So how exactly exercise we break this addiction to smartphones? A smashing way to go well-nigh things is purchase what they call a 'dumbphone'. Dumbphones, or the phones we were used to from fifteen+ years ago, used to be pretty cracking. People would actually call each other upwardly and talk rather than ship texts, emojis, and ephemeral selfies. Fake news was at an all-time low. Phones were cheaper too, dorsum then… and nearly chiefly, a phone'due south battery lasted anywhere from a week to a fortnight. Dumbphones today base themselves on the same principle. Remove the app store and internet connectivity, and you've got yourself a phone that isn't really capable of spying on you, and will prompt you to spend less time staring at pictures and videos of superficial lifestyles on social media, and more fourth dimension doing things of value… like reading those 200 books each year.

We look at ten beautiful products that solve our screen-addiction, and help us unplug from the toxicity of superficial social-network-based lives. These designs help us achieve what we need, with exactly the amount of resources needed to be productive, good for you, and happy.
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01. Blloc Minimal Smartphone

Allow'southward start elementary with the Blloc Smartphone. For people who want (or need) to stay connected to social media (like me for instance, given that ninety% of my job revolves around being informed and continued), Blloc has a pretty clever fox up its sleeve. It redesigns the entire OS to exist completely blackness and white, and creates a block-based home screen that gives yous all your snippets direct in the menu, rather than needing you lot to open each app. This, along with the phone'south grayscale OS does WONDERS for your bombardment life, and leaves y'all slightly less addicted to your phone'southward flashy, colorful OLED screen. Craving some color? Blloc even allows you lot to briefly view your content in colour, only by placing your finger on acme of the fingerprint sensor at the back! A great, minimal-compromise selection for battling screen addiction!

02. Kyocera KY-O1L

Although the name isn't especially tricky, Kyocera's KY-O1L is a lot similar the Blloc, but takes the dumbphone ethos more seriously. A recipient of the Japanese Good Blueprint Award, and also touted as the world'south thinnest telephone, the KY-O1L is literally the size of a credit card, and just a couple of millimeters thicker. Designed for the white-collar workers who still rely on concern cards, the KY-O1L fits right into cardholders, allowing you to have a telephone along with your cards that you lot can A. comport effectually with you, and B. Utilize to instantly make calls, relieve contacts, and access the web for work-related reasons. The phone does pack an LTE connection, but doesn't have an app-shop. All internet-related work is done via Kyocera'south browser, which non only optimizes webpages to keep them simple, but as well displays them to you in black-and-white, an feel that may accept getting used to, just will surely provide function without the mindless habit. The ideal phone for the kind of person who believes in hustling, keeping technology in check while being able to communicate with the world, and almost importantly, safeguarding their privacy with applied science that doesn't use apps or cameras to spy incessantly on them. It doesn't sound that bad when you say information technology that way, does information technology?

03. Punkt MP02

I wouldn't become as far as to call the Punkt MP02 a 'dumbphone' because information technology isn't. The phone comes with 4G LTE capabilities, but in virtually every regard, it's the accented antithesis of your conventional, bezel-less, dual-camera, slick-and-shiny, addictive smartphone. It comes with all the features needed in a communication device. The ability to call, text, and receive calls and messages from others. It as well comes with an absolutely finger-loving tactile keyboard that you lot'll be able to operate with muscle-memory afterward a month, letting you text without even looking at your screen. The telephone comes with an eye-friendly black-and-white screen, and does avowal of 4G LTE, only not in the way you retrieve. The 4G LTE feature on the MP02 works as a hotspot, allowing you to apply your laptop or tablet to browse the web… just when needed. This slight bit of friction (when information technology comes to accessing spider web-services) means you lot'll spend less time on the internet, and more time doing things of consequence.

04. U18 Phone

This is the U18. It's a bare-basics telephone designed for parents to requite to under-18-year-olds. It's a phone that your child volition probably not like, but so again, teenagers oftentimes don't know what's good for them, right? Information technology allows children to make, answer, and reject calls, add and remove callers, and call your dad, mom, or set up a grouping call for parents/siblings. It even has a WeChat push that's probably limited to reading texts, and a vocalization-command button that lets yous tell the phone who you want to call.
Flip the phone over and it has a camera for video calls (there'southward also a secondary forepart facing camera), and even a panic push for sending SOS signals to your emergency contacts. Designed to be the perfect outset-phone for youngsters, the U18 supplies them with all the functions needed to stay connected with the people who truly affair, and strips away all functions that could become children hopelessly fond to phones and social media, and additionally fifty-fifty protect their privacy by keeping them away from apps that spy on them or gather their precious data.

05. Halcyon 'Reality' Phone

The Halcyon does one very crucial affair correct. A person's only motivation to leave a smartphone either stems from A. realization and frustration with the habit, or B. being presented with a better culling. The Halcyon concept phone was birthed keeping both those motivations in listen. Information technology boasts of a gorgeous, flexible blueprint that rivals most smartphones in artful beauty.
Made in a clam-shell format with basic controls and two screens (one on the front-face and i on the inside), the phone serves every bit a simple connexion tool, allowing for phone calls and text messages only. The blackness and white UI keeps it simple likewise, discreetly notifying you when you have a telephone call or a text, and otherwise constantly reminding you to stay in sync with the world around you lot with its slogan "reality awaits".

06. Offline Telephone

A winner of the 2022 Cherry-red Dot Design Concept Honor, the Offline phone is your regular candybar dumbphone, just with a beautiful minimal aesthetic that actually makes you desire to adopt it. Composed of just a standard numeric keypad and a rather eye-catching opaque screen, its ultra-minimalist, stark aesthetic is complimentary of this goal. It'south seemingly unproblematic, but does allow the user brief periods of internet access then that they are always mindful of how they spend their fourth dimension online. No photographic camera, no superfluous applications… just dorsum to basics then you can live in the real earth!

07. Yeezy Phone

I get the hilarity of naming a dumbphone after Kanye Westward, but this isn't about dissing the bully rapper (with a not-and then-great reputation on Twitter). This stripped-down smartphone ditches the display entirely for a matrix of miniature lights (y'all can come across them up close here) that class a touch sensitive LED array (a reference to the recent stage designs of John McGuire, featured equally role of Kanye West's Saint Pablo Bout). The phone comes with a reinvented OS too, allowing you to practice just the important stuff. Make and take phone calls. At present if only Yeezy did the same also!

08. The Battery-less Phone

This right hither is peak dumbphone, but it showcases a engineering science that's nix short of marvelous. The Battery-less phone, although it exists only in prototype and tin't really be bought, runs without always needing to be charged. Stripped of all its functions, except calling, the battery free phone actually uses and needs minimal amounts of energy which information technology harnesses via light around it, and radio waves that linger in the air. You can make calls via the capacitive number pad, and it uses Skype to communicate with other phones. However, whenever you lot desire to utilise the microphone, you demand to concord a mic button down to relay your voice (much like a walkie talkie). The phone is but a stripped down group of circuit boards and wires for the time-beingness, but nosotros can wait a fully fabricated mobile phone too quite shortly! Marvelous, eh? You can check out the phone in activity here.

09. Substitute Telephone

Perchance the answer isn't a dumbphone. Maybe it's a fidget toy that channels your addiction/lark into something less intense. That's what the Substitute Phone is. The designer put it best: y'all're on the metro and grabbing at your phone at the first sight of seeing someone else receive a message. It's a bizarre and unhealthy inclination feeding our attention deficit and we're all guilty of information technology!
Designed with this in heed, the shape of the Substitute Phone replicates an average smartphone, however, its functions are reduced to the movements we make hundreds of times on a daily basis. Stone beads are incorporated in the body and allow you ringlet, zoom and swipe and then to speak. No digital functions – merely the simple, familiar motions. Information technology's the perfect, therapeutic arroyo to coping with smartphone withdrawal.

ten. Phone Detox Book

I mean, if y'all're going to ditch a screen to read a book, maybe start with the Phone Detox? A palm-friendly, phone-sized book that contains insights, ideas, and meditations that aid y'all get over your heavy dependency on your phone, social media, and validation addictions. The book covers relevant topics like Addiction, Monasticism, Poesy, Nature, Dating, Utopia, and even Decease. Its aim being to let us to take a pace back, breathe, and contemplate a fiddling, rather than simply consuming content the internet keeps throwing at you.
The makers of the book say that the "Telephone Detox knows nosotros dearest our phones and would never desire us to give them upwards, but it is also gently aware that these delightful gadgets bear a hidden cost. This flip book is a tool that aims to bring a little sanity to our closest, virtually intense and possibly most danger-laden technological human relationship."

That's right. Put that screen downwards and enjoy life and its beautiful imperfections!

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Source: https://www.yankodesign.com/2019/03/26/breaking-smartphone-addiction-10-designs-to-save-us-from-electronic-enslavement/

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