Dumb phones? What about dumb computers?
The effects of social media and the endless barrage of notifications have been resented more and more for the past few years. From social apps extracting every bit of info about you and your dog to sell, to notifications that are constantly screaming over each other, every day and every minute, trying to get your attention away from your daily zacharie cheese paintings. Some people want to have a phone that has no capability to run these apps, they want to use it as, well, a phone.
Flip phones have always been around even in the boom of smartphones, but the niche has gotten bigger and modern ones even have a browser and Facebook, but are so painful to use that you would actively avoid it unless you absolutely needed it.
Some have taken this renewed interest to try out new designs and features. The Punkt MP02 has a simple, almost entirely text based interface and uses Signal encryption for private messages and voice calls, and the Light Phone uses an e-ink display for longer battery and touch typing like a traditional smartphone.
Although most of them have some note worthy flaws (and usually being way too expensive), there has been a decent of amount of coverage of these phones on major news sites and have small followings. But there’s an area that I’ve almost never seen talked about and that’s the idea of a dumb computer. A computer that does one thing that every PC since the original IBM could do, type.
It doesn’t seem that crazy of an idea, how many times have you got bored and distracted when writing a paper for school and watched YouTube videos after typing two sentences? (I’ve basically done this a couple times while writing this post). That has to be enough of an occurrence that some would want something that gives them an environment to focus on productivity.
There has been attempts though, the Freewrite Traveler and Smart Typewriter are two obvious examples, but both are ludicrously expensive, the Traveler has a super tiny screen and the Typewriter just looks ridiculous. The KingJim Pomera looks neat and are a step in the right direction but are Japan only. The reMarkable Type Folio is about the closest we have right now to a modern dumb computer, an e-ink hand writing tablet with an optional keyboard. Though I don’t know how well it works as only a word processor, and I’m not the biggest fan of using a keyboard with a tablet, its price point and versatility can be a winning factor for some.
Why haven’t dumb computers caught on or rarely even acknowledged? Could be the price for some of them (it’s hard beating a Chromebook that’s $200 or even less), could be as simple as carrying around a laptop isn’t necessary 95% of the time, your phone or tablet will do what you need for almost everything.
Whatever the case, it shouldn’t be a struggle to put your words on a screen, thousands of ideas and thoughts get lost and fly into the digital noise of our devices, let’s hope there will be a device one day to make it easy to direct those thoughts to something that others can read.