Speaker 1: 00:08 [inaudible] Speaker 2: 00:09 ranked. It happened. I got a brand new phone. Oh, I'm so excited. Ah, it's android season. Wait, it's a little too early for new eye phones. James, there's new IPOs code out this year. Did you get an early iPhone? I only wish, imagine a world where you know, apple cared so much about our podcast and they're like, James, we are going to convert you to become an iPhone lover. Uh, that things, that's a reality that does not exist, but you are. We are crying. Tomorrow is the big day. It is apple day. The 10th Apple's gonna announce all the hot bones and we were thinking like 15 cameras on the back. Yeah, at least. And I heard upwards of 30 colors and downwards of like five ish colors. Either way, they're going to be colorful this year. You're going to get all your shades of pink, but like you jumped the queue. Speaker 2: 00:57 I don't get it. Why would you buy a phone a day before the apoe event? I know it sounds a little bit crazy. What if I told you while everyone, tomorrow we'll be busting out their apple pay and the credit cards and reserving the latest and hottest phones. What if I told you frank, that I bought a brand new phone that I'm using for my daily off of Ebay for $20? I'd say you got an android 4.2 phone. Do they still make android 4.2? I feel like that's, yeah, it's an android 4.2. It's got a resistive touch screen and it stopped updating when the specter virus came out. Well, what are, what have I told you that? Uh, no, I do not have a smart device. I have a feature phone. You remember feature phones? Okay. So you're such a hipster. That's my reaction. James, you're such a hipster feature. Speaker 2: 01:50 James, the mobile developer, James Xamarin specialist has a feature phone. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So those back up a little bit here. I do have a feature phone. Yes. Help me out here. Um, so okay. So I've done these challenges in the past for myself, which was how do I reconnect with the present and um, kind of get away from this inundation of constant notifications. Hmm. We know that my life already on my smartphone, which is a pixel two XL, which is my normal, that is always in do not disturb. I turn off notifications on a bunch of different applications to put it in more control. I turn off Google Assistant, I um, have it like in mute basically all day cause it's in do not disturb so it doesn't even vibrate. It doesn't do anything. I also did the delete a social media app challenge from our phone and I deleted Twitter from my phone and I was like two months ago, which was very nice. Do you remember all these things that have kind of been outlined over the last few years are joking? This Speaker 3: 03:00 has been going on since the beginning of the Internet. Look, I disconnected and let me write a medium entry about it. But please continue. Yes, I've been, I'm sorry. I don't want to undermine it. Yep. Deleting social networks is kind of liberating and fun. So I'll give you that one. We should talk about that some more. Speaker 2: 03:17 It is, yeah, I know it is. And I would say this. So I don't use very many social media platforms, but I do use Twitter a lot and I have notifications off because I think Twitter notifications are quite evil at some point. Just cause I don't need to see that. My thing has been like the a hundred times. But what intrigued me about four or five months ago as I was watching a vox video, I think on minimalistic phones out there and trying to use them and everyone came to the same confusion. They said, you just, you just can't use them anymore. I was like, it's basically you're gonna use it for a week and you're going to hate it. You're going to like it but then hate it cause it doesn't do the one or two things that you want and you're going to go back to your smart phone. Speaker 2: 03:59 And I said, I challenged this frank. I challenge, I think that I can do it because, uh, I love my smart phone. I love android. Uh, I, it's my favorite operating system. I, I do simply love it. And android 10 just dropped, uh, the day that we're recording this puppy. And uh, that's very exciting to me. And there's new features and there's tons of features, an iPhone now, an android and Ios to help you get your screen time back. And I said, well, what if you just don't have that screen in general? Uh, because even after I deleted Twitter, I had this itch, frank, which was, I knew that I could, I could be scrolling right now. There could be something happening on my device or could be an email coming in. Uh, and that was bothering me quite a bit. And so I wanted to see what was available out there. And I bought this, I bought a few different feature phones. That's what happened. Speaker 3: 04:52 Oh my God. Okay. I just, all that time you were talking, I was writing down topics like things I want to talk about that you are mentioning and we just have so many to get through. Now let's start with the easiest. Let's talk about hardware since it's got pointless software on it. At least maybe it's cool hardware. Maybe. What is the, got James, break it down. Speaker 2: 05:14 Yeah. So, okay, I bought two phones. Uh, now the first thing that I want to get across here is buying a feature phone in 2019. Speaker 3: 05:24 It's not easy or actually really hard. I was going to say funny, but okay. Hard. Yes. Hard. Um, it is, you used Ebay, you said, so you had to like, did you research models? Do people compare feature phone models anymore? Speaker 2: 05:38 So that was hard that there is, there is practically a non-existence void of feature phones in the United States of American now in India and in China. A Plethora of feature phones. Speaker 3: 05:52 Okay, that's cool. And that makes sense. Those are such large markets that it takes time, transitions to Speaker 2: 05:58 happen or that you still have the strongholds. I always thought India was Samsung country, that they are all androids there. But I guess that would make sense. Wow. So, um, there, are there new products or are you buying all used stuff? So it's really tricky. Okay. So when we talk about comparing models, the really nice thing is that Nokia, remember that company called Nokia? They were called Microsoft. Now I think Microsoft bought Nokia then sold Nokia again, parts of Nokia. It was like bombers last great move. I think. So who, who owns Nokia Wiki? So, uh, Nokia, I'm pretty sure now releases phones under there. Hmm. They're owned by someone else now. That's, I'm, I'm pretty sure that that and then someone [inaudible] Nokia. Yeah. Cause there's Nokia like in the Nokia networks, Nokia technologies, they're subsidiaries of archicad. Alcatel. But Microsoft had the phones at one point, but I guess when they did, they did and not anymore. Speaker 2: 07:01 So, uh, Nokia though they made tons of feature phones, you know, those brick phones with the snake and the banana phone and all this stuff. And they've been rereleasing a lot of feature phones overseas. Now all the feature phones overseas, there's a few problems with it. Uh, because um, in the United States there basically is only 4g I'll, I was gonna ask about this and I thought like in the modern era, we had all converged Kinda on all the GSM and CDMA and GSM and Blah, blah, blah channels and all that. But you're actually running into that in the fine year of 2019, Huh? Yeah. So in a lot of the regions of other parts of the world, you can find a lot of these feature phones run on to g technology, I think. Yeah. And that like you get a ticket if you put up a to g tower in America now, I believe that most of the networks have turned them off and maybe team mobile is turning it off next year or something else. Speaker 2: 08:05 And even the three g networks are going to go away soon too. So why? Well, no one told me about that one eventually. Right. I mean at some point they will eventually, everything will be four g LTE and 5g at some point. So the problem with importing some of those Nokia phones is the spectrums that they're on, the bands that are in there and making sure they're compatible. That's really tricky. So in America there is really only one or two feature phones and those phones that you can buy. Um, there's they both on LTE and one of them is the one that I bought, which is the Alcatel go flip, which is the grandparent phone. Is they also marketed as uh, it's, they, they sell this phone under a bunch of different brands, but it's the same phone. And then there's another, which I don't know who it's by, maybe it's a Samsung or something else, but it's the, you like rugged, smart phone, you know, the indestructable, you know, you know, type of thing. Speaker 2: 09:04 Not so smart though. It's feature phone or smartphone. Rugged feature phone feature phone. Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. That's it. Everything else is out there now. Maybe it's a fancy Kmart. Maybe it's a sign if no one else in America, nevermind. Okay. We won't get to that part yet. So, so these phones obviously selling, they are a big popular, the pop there are, they are a population obviously because they exist still. But when you look on the China Market for instance from shall me and from other companies, there are a plethora of great feature phones and they are now in the year 2019 finally getting LTE. So I imported a phone, the kin Q, Q, I n one s plus I'm from about it from gear best. And it took about one month to get here from mainland China. I love ordering in China. It's the worst waiting for things. Speaker 2: 10:00 Like I love my one day Amazon deliveries, but there's nothing better than totally forgetting about an order order from China. And then having it arrive a month or two later. It's the best. It's, it's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, I'll post this, I'll put both of these links into here for both of the phones. Uh, but it's really fun. I mean, it's fun because there are tons of these devices. There's Phillips, make some kin, make some, there's, you know, Samsung makes all these devices on here. You'll see just, you know, a Nokia, you'd be like, wow, there's just so many for everyone. I actually liked this, the one s plus here. It's not a flip phone, so it's not the old clamshell design we all used in the whatever nineties. Uh, this is wow. It's, it's, what did you, I don't even remember the name of this. Anyway, small numerical keypads. Speaker 2: 10:46 So we don't even have a quarter to keyboard. It's not a blackberry. Nothing like that. Um, looks like you're allowed to make calls with it and it has a giant screen and it's red. What color did you get this one? It has red, white, and smokey gray. I got red. Of course he did. Yeah, it looks good. Hotness. I'll be honest. It looks good. Uh, especially, especially when you're tired of carrying around devices that you have to charge every day and things like that. This is actually a tight little package. Does it have the Internet? James? I know you said it's a feature phone, but it doesn't have the Internet. So there's a few requirements. Um, when I thought about picking up a feature phone, I really wanted to make text messages, phone calls, navigate with Google maps and, and every once in awhile search for something on the Internet and trying to get something. Speaker 2: 11:34 You are not doing text messages with this, are you? This is like nineties text messages. What's the keyboard? Empty nine. What did people memorize? Yeah. Are you doing that? Well I came from a pre t nine generation so I'm learning t nine for the first time and it's great. It's really good. I learned to like for a month and then I was like no more can have smart phone. It's very good. I mean in general. So both of these phone have this now here's the cool thing about these phones is that they're both running LTE. They have a dual core processors. The Alcatel has a 1.1 dual core processor. The Shami is 1.3. They both have half a Gig of Ram, about four gigs of on disc and memory. They had off fire. What do you even need any of this? Just wait, just wait. This is where it gets real good. Okay. So they both have SD card slot expansions. Speaker 3: 12:30 Okay. For photo MP3, it can play mp3s. Does it have had a phone, a headphone Jack? Speaker 2: 12:38 Yeah. They both have a headphone Jack, correct? Yes. Which is good actually no, the, the, the show me one does not have a headphone Jack. That one's USBC PSPC adapter. They are pretty modern for feature phones. Yeah. They have a, um, they have a Bluetooth built in Wifi built in. They have wifi hotspots built in. Um, I mean, surprisingly, I'm not gonna lie about it. There's a lot going on in this phone. Uh, and it's, it's like ABG n Wifi, so it's got all the Wifi and 11 days stand by time. By the way, Speaker 3: 13:15 this is more powerful buy or no, not quite. This is way more powerful than the original iPhone. So that's why I'm Kinda like laughing here that this is a feature phone. So what you're really saying is it doesn't have a touch screen. The rest of it is, it's just a clone of an android or an iPhone. Speaker 2: 13:34 So yeah, they call these basic phones. I still call them feature phones. Now. The, the thing that really makes it different besides the fact that, yeah, you're right. This, this honestly was my first computer was a, a 600 megahertz computer or whatever at home. So like I didn't get a computer for a long time growing up. Uh, and then this thing is like four times as powerful or whatever, right. Speaker 3: 13:58 Twice as fast as the original iPhone and probably actually in practice much faster than that. So it's a modern thing. Speaker 2: 14:06 Now the thing is the, it, they each have their own operating system, which we'll talk about here in a second. But, um, they, they can't install apps. Whatever's on the phone is on the phone. So for instance, Alcatel phone, I can, that's the go flip if you will. I can, um, send text messages. There's a music player, there's a phone contacts browser, email, camera, clock gallery, FM radio calculator, video app that the minimal, right. You just, it's the stuff that you'd expect. And the, and the, and the show me one, the, the kin very similar. Um, the, the, the Shao Mi kin also has an infrared sensor in it so you can control your television with it, which is kinda crazy. Um, that's a come with Twitter. You could go to twitter.com in the browser and that does work. Speaker 3: 15:01 Okay. So you're whole goal of getting off social networks. Social networks are still accessible by it. Just checking Speaker 2: 15:09 if you really, so we were out on Mo on Labor Day was a labor day that would just happen Memorial Day Labor Day, Labor Day of we're out on labor day and we wanted to see if this brewery was open. So I just went into the browser and looked it up on there. So it's totally possible to do this stuff in general, but that's all you can do. And the, and like I said, the, the um, show me one is exactly the same. There is a browser, there's all these things on it. And, and again, my goal here was not to be like, oh, look at how cool and hip I am. I'm going back old school. Right? It was, I want to have a social experiment, which is, can I just use this phone on a day to day basis to get the minimal stuff that I want on it without being inundated? And will that actually improve my like quality of life disconnecting now, I don't know if it will. Like I'm not saying that, Oh, if you get rid of your smartphone, this will improve your life because we'll talk about it here. It's actually impossible for, for me to work. It is impossible for me to get rid of my smartphone. I can not work at Microsoft without a smartphone. Speaker 3: 16:14 Wow. It's impossible. You just, yeah, cut to the end there. I was going to, we're going to go on a long winding path, but okay. We'll go straight there. Uh, where did we begin with disconnecting? I was thinking about this this morning cause I was looking at the Twitter this morning and I was counting the number of things I'm supposed to be angry about and it was just, it was like three or four and I was like, Gosh, I don't really have the energy to be angry about these right now. But like I queued it up to get angry about them later just to make a mental note about it and to think about it. And that got me to thinking, yeah, how am I using Twitter? How, how is all that stuff? I think it's a healthy question to constantly ask yourself. I think the worst case that you could ever do is allow the social networks to completely dominate your life to the point where you feels like disconnecting is needed. Speaker 3: 17:04 Like this connecting for me is nice. I can kind of naturally do it myself. I'm a sociopath so I don't really care what other people think. So I'm just like, I can just walk away from the Internet. But at the same time, I'm, I get the same dopamine reaction as everyone else. You like to read the news, you know, like to know what the royalties dog is doing or whatever stupid news they're pushing on us today. Um, so that's a long way of saying, um, this has been what's called a manageable problem for me. Do you think you hit like a wall or do you think, uh, you just wanted more help in your management of internetting? Speaker 2: 17:42 Well, yeah. Let me talk about exactly why I got into this state and how I get into the state and why I didn't think could disconnect from my smart phone to do that and accomplish it without doing this trial. But first, let's thank our sponsor this week from one of my favorite podcasts, that tech meme ride home. Listen, stop what you're doing right now. Open up your podcast app. Search for the tech meme ride home every single day. Brian McCullough, friend of the show drops on the latest tech news every single day, 5:00 PM eastern from the technium.com editors. They give you the latest and greatest. It's happening in Silicon Valley. The most up to date news that you need to know about. It's 15 minutes. It's on your ride home every single day. It is a joy to listen to. It is literally my ride home every single day. Brian also puts out bonus episodes on the weekends, so even on the weekend you have something to listen to. Speaker 2: 18:34 I have been listening to it from nearly day one and there's over 300 episodes of goodness, but what's great is that you can start right now, whatever day it is. There's a news episode for your ride home. Simply search tech meme ride home and your podcast application and thanks to tech meme ride home for sponsoring this week's pod. Also sponsoring this week's pod is tellerik listen, are you building a smartphone app or a beautiful website or hack even a brand new blazer app for the desktop or for the web? Well, tellerik has you covered. They make sure that your applications look awesome by packing them full of awesome UI components designed specifically for each platform. They have full support for Ios, android, Xamarin, Blaser, javascript, typescript, all the things that you could possibly want. And for Mobile, they just shipped a brand new pdf view or popup control doc, layout manager and so much more. Speaker 2: 19:25 If you want to find about, I find out about tellerik and how they can help you create beautiful applications. So your customers are super happy. Just go to tellerik.com that's it. Had to tell her right.com pick your platform and boom, your app is going to be amazing. Thanks to Tellerik for sponsoring this week's pod. Thank you. Tellerik yeah, so Heather said, James, why don't you just delete all your apps? Just delete all the apps, you know, delete every single app on your smart phone, you know, do all this stuff, you know, and then it's there. Yeah. And I had this conversation with my friend Jesse because my thought was like you is when I read the news, when I read Twitter, when there's all these things, I'm constantly getting inundated on a daily basis by Google hangouts, by text messages, by news, by Twitter, by email, by snapchat, by phone. Speaker 2: 20:13 Like Google photos, like, Hey, we know we updated this photo and now it looks pretty like, okay, like I have deposits and I have Redfin notificate I'm scrolling through my phone, my pixel phone and I literally have like a hundred texts like this person streaming right now, like it's just so much for me to manage in a daily basis and yes I could delete everything. Frank, this is a true statement but I will say this. The thing with the modern operating systems of these phones of 2019 is that they are very good of having forced in it and what I mean by that is when you swipe to the laughter to the writer up, there's things in there like I have this Google newsfeed, I have no idea how to get rid of it. It's just always there. There's always news on my phone all the time. There's always weather on my phone and there's always other things on my phone and on android and I don't know how it is on Ios, but I'm thinking it's similar. You don't get to delete everything. Like there's some things that you just can't delete. If you don't want this thing, no, you can't delete that. So Speaker 3: 21:19 you're just making me think of um, well all the terrible notifications that you get over the years. But I was thinking specifically about the windows start menu when at first it was neat cause we had live tiles and it's like, here's the weather and here's some photos from your photo thing and here maybe here's an email or something. But then yeah, it turned into here's the Microsoft store, here's Youtube, here's this, here's a blinky thing, blinky thing, blinky thing, more blinky things. And you really can get inundated with that. And so just as mental health, I always turn all that stuff off. And that's, I always felt so weird about lifestyle because I loved the idea of it. I just knew with my brain it just, we weren't that compatible with each other. And so I had to turn a lot of that off. And you know, it's funny that you're mentioning Google news because my God, apple pushes their news to apple news. Speaker 3: 22:09 If I'm not a vigilant Eagle, then I get inundated with political news constantly. And you know me, I love politics, but I don't care one fig about federal politics at all. It's just not something I care about. And yet that's all they want to push on you constantly is rage culture and get upset about this, get upset about that. And so fighting against those things is definitely gotten harder. But I will say, because I am an apple fan boy, they're making a lot of improvements here and um, more fine grained control of notifications. Or in my case, I had your same problem where I just wanted a clean slate and I just turned off all notifications off my watch at least because it's just like, I'm wearing this watch. This is supposed to be a tool for me. It's not supposed to be tapping my wrist every 10 minutes, forcing me to do something. It's my tool. I don't want the outside world to be able to tap my wrist. Speaker 2: 23:07 Yeah. And I, and it's funny because I also, at the time when I bought my first smartwatch, I had to take it off because you didn't have that fine grain control over it at the time. And I was just getting constantly inundated with my, my android wear device at the time and I, I couldn't handle and that was one of the first signs. I told the story where I was sitting in Boston and my browser dinged my phone data and my smart phone dinged and I was having a conversation and all these things were dinging and vibrating and I was like, this is inappropriate. I had too many things all happening, you know, inappropriate. I just love that response. But um, it kind of makes, cause Speaker 3: 23:42 that's, that's reminded me of 'em back in the day when we had the analog phones and a house would have multiple phones in it. So some, when someone called the house, the entire house would ring. You know, just the 8 million phones would go off. As I remember, there was a sweet spot maybe around 2010 or 2012 where everyone just had individual devices and places were quiet. But now I joke, I have so many computers and they all share the phone calls and everything that a hundred things can ring. Again, whenever someone calls me or whenever a notification comes in, the whole house, once again, just like the 1970s starts ringing and I'm like, oh my God, I don't need this level notification. Speaker 2: 24:19 It's true. When I used to get, when I used to have slack on my phone, I'd get a slack call and it would ring on my browser and I would have like two, two of them opening. So they both are ringing and my phone is right. I'm like, what does that have it? I go, oh my goodness, you know, Speaker 3: 24:32 can't handle it. Okay. But this phone that you guys, it can still do notifications. Right? Did you, did you go through and turn all those off? Speaker 2: 24:40 Okay. So, yeah. Okay. So let's talk about the notifications on, on this device. So, uh, on each of these devices, what's unique here is that they each have their own operating system. And this is what I found very peculiar about the world of feature phones in 2019. So there is an operating system on this Alcatel phone called Chi o. S have you ever heard of it? Kate? A I o s Speaker 3: 25:08 no, I haven't. I'd like to know what the kernel is, but I'm just gonna assume it's a Linux colonel. Um, that's correct. Yeah. Everyone just use this on Linux kernel is an android based. It doesn't have to be android, android to be android based. Some people just like all the drivers in the libraries to come with android. Do you know if it has that? Speaker 2: 25:27 It is not so kind of ass isn't mobile operating system based on Linux? Uh, it's by [inaudible] technologies. Uh, it is a fork of B to g boot to Gecko and open source community driven successor to Firefox. O s Speaker 3: 25:44 wow. Okay. So it's a rewrite of Firefox. Oh, S I love that. Um, it's always sad to see good technology go away. Um, Mozilla did a terrible job of marketing their thing and it all fell apart, so it's good to see that the idea who lived on somewhere. Speaker 2: 26:04 Yeah. And a coyote is the second most used operating system in India. Speaker 3: 26:12 Right. Super Cool. Okay. I don't know. I, I'm still putting it in a hipster, but knowing that it's super popular in India, I guess it's not hipster, it's just useful. Speaker 2: 26:23 And then there's a bunch of phones that use this, which is really cool. So the go flip is really well known. It's also called the my flip or the trace on which is on trace flow phone and also flip two on 18 d. So it's just been rebranded. Right. Um, but it is pretty minimalistic and it was all about just bringing forward GLT, but it's all html a five base. So even though this hardware is relatively powerful, I would honestly say it's still a little bit sluggish, which I found really hilarious in 2019 that would be kind of the whole reason I'd want a feature phone. It's so that all of the processing power can be devoted to just real time interaction. You know, I want to 120 hertz refresh rate on the screen. So that's a little bit sad to me, man. Stupid wet technology, you don't all slow. Speaker 2: 27:11 It is. Now that said, on the flip side, the one s plus is running a modified version of android. So it's a very slim down, trim down, completely custom version of android itself. Um, and it feels very, very fast. So I don't know what they did with it, but they trimmed out everything. So there's no app store, there's no anything, but it has its own apps and those apps, you know, our contacts and, and it has like a kind of android ish look and feel and keyboard and stuff. I haven't used it too much because there is an English mode on it, but there's still a lot of like Chinese intermixed. So I need to figure that out a little bit. So I want the other one, but get to your notification questions. There is pretty fine grain control. There's permissions in there. So there is a camera app and you have to grant it permission to the camera, which I find hilarious. Speaker 2: 28:03 It's the only app that has permissions by the way, over from Android, I guess, I'm assuming. I guess so, yeah. The third one you're talking about? Yeah, that's the Caio s one. Oh, okay. So that's a whole different, that's, that's a whole different villa. And this is, yeah, and this is running like a, of a early version of chaos. There's an new version of chaos that actually does have like a mini app store I believe too. Um, which I think is Kinda cool. Uh, but in general, um, there's like a bar, there's backup and stuff like that and, and whatnot. But it is Kinda cool to think about, but yet to get to your notification question yet, you can kind of have some fine grain control over it. The only notifications that you're going to get our messages or phone and that's it. There's no other, there is email. Speaker 2: 28:50 So, um, you can put email on there. I have it synchronized like every hour or two a take a fake Gmail account that I set up, but I, I plan on not using it unless it's like an emergency, you know. Um, you know, this is a developer podcast called merge conflict. I have to ask the obvious question here, James. How do I write apps for these phones? Uh, great question. So both of these phones that I currently own, you cannot do any of that. However, no. Even the android based on, you can't, if they didn't leave in the application model. No. And that was all over it's very popular question too. And they completely locked it down so you can't even siloed it or pseudo it or anything. [inaudible] that makes me really sad. I would want to program these things. I think you already said they have browsers, so obviously you could write a web apps, but you know I meant real apps. Yes. And you go wider or you could do that. But there is actually a caio s developer portal because s to the updated one, a has an entire app store and, and way of developers doing stuff. So it's actually completely possible to do. There's like a developer portal, developer dot [inaudible] dot com you can learn all about the coyotes operating systems. So in actuality, uh, not this phone, but if I get an update or a newer phone has it, it's completely possible that if you need on, Speaker 3: 30:16 um, so I'm just gonna go, I have no idea. I'm just going to go out on a limb and say it's web-based because that's how the Os is for that pie thing. Uh, so this app store is up and running. I could write an app today and start making monies. Speaker 2: 30:31 That's from my understanding, I guess I can't validate that, but my understanding is yes, you can. So inside of here they have an example of building, uh, to do application and in Vanilla javascript react UJS or angular support. So definitely web technology. You're running a web app. Yeah. Or plasm question mark, I don't know. Does doesn't sound like, Speaker 3: 30:59 well, it's powerful hardware and they'd probably run faster than Java script, to be honest, if they got it to work. Oh boy. Okay. So we talked about notifications. I guess the other distractions phone's provide that maybe you're trying to avoid. Is that dopamine of scrolling through Instagram or reddit or Twitter or any of those? And I guess the idea with these phones is the UI is so bad that you don't want to do it. Has that been working out for you? Speaker 2: 31:28 Yeah, I mean to enter a URL or browse the internet to search around, you're not just, you're not just gonna do this. Right? You can, you can, it has a, what is the screen? Three 20 by two 40 or something. If you go to Kotaku or in gadget, it'll totally load the website. It'll take a long time, like 30 seconds to load. Uh, and you can scroll and you can zoom out. It is a very not pleasurable thing to do, but you can do it like I can do, I'm reading the news on Kotaku right now. Speaker 3: 31:59 Sorry. Does it have a touch screen? I guess I'm, no, no. So there's just buttons to zoom in and out. Speaker 2: 32:05 One in three? Yes. That's hilarious. It's great. A lot one, I'm going to wait a month and get one. So my favorite thing to do though is use Google maps Speaker 3: 32:17 and that works. It Google must've put a lot of effort into optimizing it for the platform. Huh? Cause I wouldn't have guessed that that would work well. Speaker 2: 32:25 So when you go to Google maps, which is just the website, so there's, it's not an app, obviously it's just a website and yeah, you can search, you can show your map, you can do navigation. It is hilarious. Uh, when you search something, like I was searching, we're going to Michael's recently to do some crafting and you pull up the details. I can [inaudible]. What's cool is you go up left and down, it moves a Kurt mouse cursor around on the screen and you go, yeah, you go to it and you can say your location. So right now it's going to find my gps location on my phone and it's going to navigate, but it's not real time navigation. It is turn by turn direction and there's a back and next button and it just kind of progresses through and it's amazing. It's all I ever wanted to. I love it so much. So. Speaker 3: 33:11 Wow. So all the innovations we've been making for the last nine years, you're just completely rejecting. I get it, but I like my 3d maps with there. It's 120 her animations, James, I'm not going to give them up, not going to do it, but I will say the size of this phone is really growing on me, so I'm kind of wishing that we had like a iPod touch size or no iPod touch, um, even smaller than that, like a iPod shuffle or an iPod, Nano sized iPhone. Now that's what you're actually making me desire through all this conversation. Speaker 2: 33:46 Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's different. You know, I was at Michael's and it was funny, I was finding a coupon online and I, they scan the tiny little screen and it totally worked. And the, the, the girl behind the counter, she was as you must've been a maybe a gen Z or maybe, maybe, maybe barely millennial and Fifi a w what's after Zza QW I don't know. Um, and she was like, whoa. She's like, well, that's so cool. It's like, she's like, it's like you're going back in time. Just like, that's, that's, you know, so you out there, she's like, I've always wanted to do that. Right. Uh, and I thought that was really funny. And I was getting really interesting comments on it. Uh, and you know, it worked as is, I'm only honestly four or five days into this experiment. And, uh, I found myself pulling out my phone basically none because I can't do those things. I can't scroll. There's nothing to go to. And um, you know, I typed messages, I placed phone calls and beyond that there's not much to do. I have taken photos, um, which is fun and I'm going to send you one frank right now judging photos. This is really entertaining because uh, the reviews for this phone are really bad and people will be like, oh, the camera's so bad. And like it's a two megapixel camera. Like Speaker 3: 35:03 I've used digital cameras since the beginning. I have seen bad. So I'm, I'm just looking forward to placing this one in time. Like what year would I have gotten this kind of picture that's on my phone. Speaker 2: 35:15 Go to your phone. Yeah. So this shirt sand, there we go. I'm going to send it Speaker 3: 35:20 about podcasts while I'm waiting for this thing to transfer. Can I listen to podcasts on my featureless phone? Speaker 2: 35:26 So this is my new favorite part of this device is I'm, I'm getting to experience as I put on my developer shoes. I think the same things as you. As soon as I got, I said, how do I listen to my, and that's what I needed to know. Um, so there's no podcast app, but there is a video player is still sending by the way. So we'll see if it goes through here. Um, so there is no, um, podcasts app, obviously no app. Well maybe, maybe now that the app store is open, but not yet. Um, so what if I have you heard of a small application called iTunes? Have you heard of that? Um, it was made by Microsoft, I believe. So. I do believe that that is, that's uh, correct. Yes. So, so here's what I found out is I bought a little 32 GIG SSD card for this puppy, right? Speaker 2: 36:19 And I said, well, there's gotta be a way to synchronize folders. So I installed iTunes from the Microsoft store, which is a wind 32 application now cause it's all bubbled up and, and it downloads stuff to your computer. So I said, well what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug this in via USB, which is how it comes and synchronize folders. So whenever I go in windows feature or an iTunes feature, I got a little lost. Ah, so here's the thing. So when you plug in this device, it is an m t p device. Uh, so I remember this from the 90s that's right. Like all that terrible calendar thinking and all that. It's all a part of it. It's all, it's all that. It's all, it's all thing. It's all happening. Speaker 2: 37:12 It's all happening. Yes. So, uh, what's great about this is that I'm trying to send this to you. Here we go and send this. Oh no fail. Yeah, I'm trying to try to send this off here. There we go. Hey. And sent or trying to send it again. So there was a quest in which I had to, how do I synchronize this? iTunes will download music onto my computer. How do I get them onto my device without having to manually drag them over? Because when I plug this in, it comes up and here's an SD card and I can put stuff on there. And I found an app, it's at least for windows, it's called a good sync. And good sync is awesome because you can think of it as automated synchronization tasks. Uh, and you can have two way sync or one way sync. Speaker 2: 38:05 And what we'll do is you give it a folder on your computer and then you say, where do you want to synchronize this folder? Anywhere else had another folder to Dropbox, to the cloud or to an MTP device. Do you know? Um, so what I do is I plug in my phone, I open up good sync, and when I want to synchronize podcast, I say sync and it copies everything. So if I listened to a podcast, I delete it, do whatever photos, Bingo, mango done. And that's also how I synchronized photos from this beautiful two megapixel camera back to my computer. And that's pretty cool. Speaker 3: 38:38 Okay. I like it. I approve of it, but I think the greatest innovation over the last nine years was the lack of need to sink. I'm just so over sync. I think I would still kind of go for like a web based, um, podcast player. There's probably some out there that you could use. So, or maybe you could write one for the phone, but uh, that, that all brings up nightmares. Now James, I would like to talk about this terrible photo. Yeah. Speaker 2: 39:02 Just sent me. Yes, I was. Okay. I was at, so, yeah. So terrible. Okay. So let's talk about that cause I've got a few more things to talk about. But yeah. So to get to finish your photo thing or take your finish your video or music thing, what's cool is iTunes has all the artwork and it shows all the artwork has all the shows. So, and it all plays and it has a, you know, an output audio Jack. So it totally works. So it does work. No. Okay. I know 1.2 x, but besides that it works very good. Very good. Very good. Speaker 3: 39:29 Now let's talk about the camera. I don't want to, I don't want to diss it too bad. I mean the photo, it has recognizable shapes in it. It vaguely resembles the color blue when it should, I'm assuming those things were actually blue. It's just a bit noisy and blurry at the same time, which is pretty impressive. Um, I'm pretty sure like a highly trained, very sophisticated drone network could wow. It's even got fringing nevermind. It's got a little optical distortion too. Um, I think a neural network could clean this up a little bit, but your thumb came out nicely, so that's good. Speaker 2: 40:05 My thumb, let me see here. That's in the bottom right. I feel it's hard to, hard to get your thumb out of the way. The camera and that, so yeah, it is. It is over there, Huh? That's funny. Fun Speaker 3: 40:15 flair on everything. There's artificial fake, accidental Boca. Um, yeah. It's amazing. Speaker 2: 40:21 I love it. But clearly you can clearly see that I was playing pinball and I was drinking a bad, Jimmy's a bad light. Speaker 3: 40:29 The truth is this. In a world where none of us ever go back and look at our old photos. This is more than enough when I'm 80 years old, scrolling back through my 30 year age and I'm like, Yup, beer can at bad Jimmy's. That's Speaker 2: 40:45 it's like, Yup. All right, so one, yes, you are never going to take a photo on this thing and it's slow. It's terrible. That's not why you got this phone. You didn't get this phone for this. Not expecting it to be great at all and it's definitely not. And that is one of the shortfalls. But again, the, here's the thing that it comes down to because we've been talking about this for 40 minutes. So let's get into the yes, let's get into the Creme de la creme because we don't care about these beautiful two mega picture pixel cameras that are, you know, 1200 by 1600. Pretty, pretty good, actually. Pretty good. Um, it is, I did have him on my computer and they do look pretty rough. Um, when you open them, when you see them on a very small screen, you look okay. But yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I mean it looks like it was artificially Speaker 3: 41:34 rescan itself. Hillary, Speaker 2: 41:37 it's very bad. Uh, yes. So here's the Creme de la creme of this because I said earlier, I can't get rid of my smartphone. It's actually impossible because there's a little thing on the Internet called two factor authentication. You know about two factor authentication shoot. Speaker 3: 41:55 Darn. Yeah. Two factors. Kind of the bane of my existence now actually I never minded to factor as much as I mind everyone using those key generator app things now because a, it turns out I'm bad at them and I keep losing my authenticator token thinners and that means I literally have to like call people and give them my license. It's, it's so gross. So I think that the modern scare of you should fear everything on the Internet and get quadruple authentication is ridiculous. And I hate participating in it and yet it is a feature of our modern world that we're stuck with. So James, I'm assuming this phone has no compatibility with any of that. Speaker 2: 42:38 Well, if you do the most insecure two factor authentication over SMS, then absolutely it'll work just fine. Frank Speaker 3: 42:46 of security. If someone hacks your smart phone SMS Id, then you have bigger problems than whatever amount of money is in your stupid bank account. Speaker 2: 42:54 It's true. But that said, yeah, obviously I'm not getting my Google authentic here. Um, I have an authenticator for work in which I have to use my thumbprint to log in, um, as well. So all of these different things, um, lead to the fact that I can't go to work without actually having this phone with me in, in general. There might be ways to have it so it has to call you and give you codes or do something. But again, that's not also secure either. Um, so, so that's really what it comes down to at the end of the day is I can't necessarily get rid of this phone. And additionally, since I can't get rid of it, it also means that I will be carrying around a great camera with me at all times for all intensive purposes. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to carry around that phone all the time, frank, because if I have to bring it to work, I can shove it in my backpack, you know? Speaker 2: 43:45 I can carry it with me. When we went out the other day, a yesterday, traveling all over, and when I went to go play pinball, I just brought my, just this little flip phone because that's what I want to be as much as possible. So during work trips, boom, I'm good to go and then I can use this whenever I need to. Now. That's what I'm kind of going towards at this point because if I go on holiday, I want to be able to take good photos so I'm not going to bring this camera or if I bring this camera, I'm also going to bring my other phone or an actual camera because I need to take really good photos because I'm on holiday. I don't want to make a pixel photos of my trip to wherever I'm going. That's shenanigans, you know what I mean? But on a day to day basis when I'm just out going to the store, out, playing pinball out, hanging out with you, hacking our game, boy, I don't actually need my smart phone, you know? And then that does that sort of decouples me from the ability to get on to all those things and check my email and check the twitters and all those things. So that's kind of the process that I'm putting in my mind. Speaker 3: 44:50 Ah, I was sad there in the beginning because we just spent all that time talking about how this phone is pathetic and yet some health still satisfies the most basic needs that we all have. And so I was kind of on board with it and I was rather enjoying the blurry photo on everything. And then you said you have to carry around a big old android and I hate carrying multiple devices. I could never do that. So I'm a little bit lucky. I don't think I'm as boxed in to the authentication networks. So I feel like your experiment would probably work better on me or anyone else, but no way in the world am I giving up my iPhone 10. I love the stupid device. I just wish it were a little smaller. So I appreciate, uh, your experiment. I really do. Um, and I hope it's more successful. I hope you can find a way around all those authentication schemes because, and I hope that you don't end up getting into the habit of carrying around the android or this all fall apart in a week. We'll have to do an update. Speaker 2: 45:48 Yeah. You know, and then that's kind of why it's an experiment and we'll see how it goes. And the biggest highlight is that I've had so far besides not scrolling is it's actually really nice to not have a like one pound device in your pocket. Like it's really nice up the thighs. That's all I keep thinking about is probably how light the stupid print. Yeah. Well, and then I had me thinking what if Motorola rerelease the razor, how cool would that be? Speaker 3: 46:16 I think they could even make a smaller one at this point because even the razor had a lot of bezel around it like you could do on really tight phone. Speaker 2: 46:24 I think so. I'm just saying it'd be great idea and all it needs to do again, text messaging, phone calls, Google maps, like it's all really neat. People like pop call. I really need it. And podcasts your right to play audio files. That's good. Yeah. No, I mean, and that's what had me really thinking about longterm of, of this, of this device or other things is will it facilitate those needs? Because Google maps, to me, podcasts are important, but Google maps is the end all be all of being able to do it and we'll see you in a few weeks in a week and a day. Who knows? Maybe by the time this podcast outs, I've given it all up frank, Speaker 3: 47:01 I have more faith in you than that, but I'm going to give it a few months tops because eventually you're gonna want your dopamine. Got to check out the Instagram's got to make your social profile big. Speaker 2: 47:13 Yo something, I don't know. Well, yeah, correct. Well, we'll see how it goes. But Frank, let me thank you for honestly letting me talk about this topic for 45 minutes. It's kind of ridiculous and I felt bad because I know that we have, uh, an apple event coming up and I'm going to want to just chit chat about that for a long time. So I'm putting in my time with this episode. Shane, you guys good. I'm also very curious if other people have tried an experiment. I have now talked to a lot of people that have been talking to me that they didn't go the route that I went, but they ended up going down different routes to try to decouple themselves from their smartphones. So going down the mental sort of experiment of every time you go to reach for your phone, stopping thinking, do I really need to do this right now? Speaker 2: 48:03 Or like you said, turning off all notifications or monochrome, doing your screen and what has worked, what hasn't worked. I'm, I'd be super curious, um, to be honest with you because I believe that most people nowadays kind of want to disconnect just a little bit. Even it's just a little bit. Um, I could be wrong. Maybe I'm crazy. I don't know frank. Well, I hope to, goodness everyone's disconnecting at least from the default settings because with the number of Apps I have on my phone, if I wasn't rigorous about same notifications, it would be buzzing a few times an hour at least. No more than that. What am I even saying? Probably every five minutes. So thank God I don't, we don't live in that world. We can at least stable that much. Yeah, I'd be interested to hear. I think we all have our techniques for dealing with the Internet. Yeah. Alright, well thank you frank for letting me talk your ear off and thanks to all of our listeners for keeping in with us while we talk about these features. It's really, it's a fun world to get into. I swear. It's really, really bananas. Uh, anyways, uh, I'll let everyone know how it's going in the next few weeks, but until next time, this has been emerge. Comment Speaker 1: 49:05 flicked. I'm James Monto Mag now and I'm Frank Kroger. Thanks for listening.