Hello! I am back from a few weeks spent on the other side of the planet, visiting my sister in Australia and a short side trip to New Zealand. This was my first trip to a different continent, other than south America. First time crossing an ocean, first time leaving for over 2 weeks and first time spending such a long time on a plane. So it’s still hard to believe it happened and was real, now that I am back home on my couch. I have been home for a few days and I’m finally getting back into the rhythm of things, and sleeping all the way through the night again (damn jet lag). I still haven’t sifted through my trip photos yet but once I do, a few posts will be in order to talk about my favorite spots we visited. Today, I’m actually talking about a whole other subject!
Back in February, I read an article online about a girl who spent a week using an old Nokia 3310 phone from 2000 instead of her beloved iPhone 6. You can read the french article here. One thing that really hit me in this article was that this girl was so happy to be reunited with her iPhone at the end of the week and compared her experience to hell, rather than spiritual enlightenment. And I thought to myself, I would love to disconnect like that, this experience was wasted on her. HA. To each their own I guess? I have a love/hate relationship with technology but I sometimes forget that not everybody shares that opinion with me.
Anyway, this article planted a seed in my brain, and I spend the following hours researching phones that did the bare basics and nothing more. I thought to myself there must be something out there that meets my needs. After much searching and reading a lot of articles about peoples’ experiences with digital detoxes, I finally decided I wanted a Punkt dumb phone.
The price tag was high for something that doesn’t even let you connect to the internet so I told myself I would think it over. In the meantime, I continued to read articles about disconnecting and peoples’ experiences with this phone. I was pretty convinced but wanted to make sure I didn’t make too quick of a decision. A few weeks later, when I saw there was a discount on the Canadian retailer’s site, I couldn’t help myself and jumped on the occasion.
I received the phone just before my trip and decided that after being semi-disconnected and halfway across the world for a few weeks, it would be a good time to make the switch. I had done my research on what phone plan I wanted to sign up for. The Punkt phone uses a sim card too so it is a great option for those who only want to disconnect once in a while or on weekends. I thought it would be perfect since it would leave me the option to switch back to an iPhone on occasions when I would need access to my emails or to google maps, lets say. But as I didn’t plan on using data very much, I could downgrade to a cheaper phone plan.
I went with Fido, as it is owned by Rogers who is the only company that still uses GSM, which is the network that the Punkt phone uses. I went for a 1 gig plan for those days where I will need to connect and unlimited calling in canada, us and international. So as of 3 days ago, I have been using my dumb phone!
It’s too early to say much about my experience but here are my feelings and observations so far:
- It is not that bad!
- I’ve tried to pull out my phone to show someone a picture only to realize it’s on my iPhone at home.
- I really don’t need to take pictures of all of my brunch dishes.
- I now only text what’s worth saying because it takes some time to type it all out.
- I really don’t miss emojis but I feel like others will find it hard to express themselves without them when texting me.
- I can still access all my iPhone apps (on wifi) in the morning or evening before I leave the house.
- It’s nice not to feel that constant pull from my phone to check on what other people are doing.