I abandoned my iPhone for a $90 flip phone. Life's never been better.

On Feb. 4, 2025, I would make a decision that would frustrate all of my friends, strain my work life and, on occasion, leave me completely reliant on the goodwill of strangers. But first, I needed to call my mom. 

As we spoke, I was walking down Folsom Street on my way to work. My iPhone was connected to my AirPods, which allowed me to speak with her, even as I held a mug of tea in one hand and a piece of half-eaten toast in the other. This - hands-free calling - was one of the luxuries I would soon leave behind. I was explaining to my mom why I had just purchased a flip phone.

"Why do you have to go and make your life harder?" she asked me. There was more than a hint of consternation in her voice. I didn't have a simple answer then, and four months later, I still don't. In many tangible ways, my life is harder now. And still, switching to a flip phone was probably the best decision I've ever made. 

‘No single intervention has emerged as clearly superior'

Shortly after that phone call, I took the SIM card out of my iPhone, inserted it into my new Nokia 2780 Flip and began my new life. It started terribly. 

SFGATE culture reporter Timothy Karoff shows the menu from his flip phone. (Charles Russo/SFGATE)

At the beginning, I pissed off my friends and family. I was a bad texter before I got a flip phone. Now, I was also a slow texter. My initial messages were answered with scornful comments about green bubbles. Mostly sarcastic, hopefully? One friend thought I had blocked her number. 

If you, too, want to alienate your friends, you can follow my steps:

• First, I went to my carrier's store and switched my eSIM for a physical SIM card. This cost $10 and took about 20 minutes. 

• The phone I originally wanted, the Cat S22 Flip, is not supported by my carrier, so I browsed r/dumbphones, a 141,000-member forum for dumbphone users, for the next-best option. I landed on the Nokia 2780 Flip, which I ordered from Best Buy for $89.99. 

• I purchased a 32 GB SD card from an electronics shop on Mission Street for about $15. I then ported my iPhone's contacts to my laptop and downloaded them onto the SD card.

Measured against Apple's standards of quality, my phone is a buggy piece of junk, a prepackaged case study in unplanned obsolescence. After four months, my texting app freezes for no reason, and if I close my phone too quickly, the battery dislodges, causing the phone to restart. The music app takes about a minute to load. The camera takes several seconds to snap a photo. 

So why go through the trouble? My reasons are simple, and I suspect they're universal. I couldn't control my phone use, and it was making me feel terrible. I was sick of deleting Instagram, only to reinstall it a week later. I was sick of hallucinating "phantom vibrations," and I was sick of clocking four hours of screen time on an average day, despite my constant efforts to cut back.

Owning a smartphone is a sort of devil's bargain. The device grants its user superpowers: We can schedule dentist's appointments from the back of an Uber. We can arrive in a new city and, without speaking to anybody, know where to find the best burrito. If there's a line for burritos, we can just Venmo a street vendor for a hot dog. 

And in exchange for these powers, we agree to remain more or less permanently tethered to our devices. In a recent survey from Reviews.org, the average respondent checked their phone 205 times per day, and 78% reported feeling uneasy leaving the house without their phones (91% of Americans have smartphones, a percentage that climbs to 98% in my demographic of 18-29). In the past decade or so, managing one's phone use has grown into a forever problem, a balancing act in the same category as maintaining a healthy sleep schedule and watching one's diet. 

When I reached out to Stanford professor Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, author of "Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality," about cellphone addiction, he told me that problematic internet use statistics have only gone in one direction since his research group began studying them in 2006: up. 

Researchers have studied a host of strategies to help people regulate their phone use, including therapy, medications and apps that block certain websites. But ultimately, there's no silver bullet. The best solutions are individualized to a smartphone user's habits, Aboujaoude said, and seek alternate rewards to gradually replace problematic behaviors.

"No single intervention has emerged as clearly superior or universally helpful," Aboujaoude told SFGATE.

Flipping the script

In that case, what if the solution isn't to regulate smartphone use? What if we gave up on our devices and broke the devil's bargain?

Every few months, Fast Company or CNBC will write an article on the resurgence of the "dumbphone" among Gen Zers and millennials. It was one of these stories, by New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill, that convinced me to take the plunge. Hill attempted what she called Flip Phone February, the iPhone addict's equivalent of Dry January. 

"It was a relief to unplug my brain from the internet on a regular basis and for hours at a time," Hill wrote after the month was over. "I read four books ... I felt that I had more time, and more control over what to do with it."

Jose Briones displays a podcast that he listens to on his Light Phone 2 at his apartment in Littleton, Colo., on March 24, 2023. (Jason Connolly/AFP via Getty Images)

"More control." That's what I wanted. That's what I felt I had lost, 10 years ago, when I booted up my first smartphone. And apparently, I'm not alone. Sales of the minimalist Light Phone grew by 150% last year, and roughly 75% of the phone's users are between the ages of 20 and 35. 

"The pandemic really helped a lot of people realize they have a problem," Light Phone co-founder Kaiwei Tang told me in an interview. His customers have reported that they feel less stressed, sleep better and get more time back, even though roughly half still have a backup smartphone, an arrangement that Tang describes as "part-time" use.

A phone is a tool like a hammer or screwdriver, Tang said. When you hammer a nail into a wall, you don't mess around with the hammer for three hours afterward. 

"The problem is not the phone. The problem is the business model that needs to maximize engagement to make money," Tang said.

Crossed wires

The world is built for smartphones, which is something you don't notice until you leave yours behind. Whenever I left the house, I found myself running into invisible walls. Shortly after I switched phones, I suffered a concussion, and when I arrived at the doctor's office, the receptionist texted an intake form to my Nokia, which I could not open. After some back-and-forth, they let me see a doctor anyway, which was lucky. While running late to another appointment, I tried to ride a Bay Wheels bike but needed my iPhone to unlock it. I had to take the bus instead.

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Frustrations like these are common. "I'm so frustrated with every single shop, restaurant, theatre, etc. making me use a damn app to use their services," a recent post in r/dumbphones reads. 

There's also the problem of wasted time. I stay locked to my desk answering Slack messages, when I would have previously dashed off responses on the train ride home. Without the transit app, I show up at bus stops too early or too late. I lose only a few minutes here and there, but they added up. 

The greatest strain, though, was communication. My group chats balked at my request that they split my contact into two parts - one contact for my cellphone number, which would route texts to my Nokia, and one for my iCloud email address, which would collect iMessages. This setup would let me stay in all my old group chats, but it annoyed and confused most of my friends.

The Nokia 2660 Flip, a classic flip phone, the Nokia 8210 4G, and the new Nokia 5710 XA being exhibited together as Nokia features retro phones during the Mobile World Congress on March 2, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Around this time, I stopped receiving texts from the family group chat. This ended in a couple of uncomfortable conversations with my mom, who thought I was ghosting her. Oops!

My texts became strictly functional. "Do we need to buy more milk?" "Happy birthday!" "What are you doing tonight?" The words I got most used to typing, though, were "call me." If I wanted to make conversation, I made a call. Sometimes, a friend would decline my call and text me back, and I would call again. Nobody enjoyed this dance.

The pain leaked into my work life, too. (Try convincing a source to speak on the record while typing at a rate of 20 words per minute.) Shortly after I switched phones, I published a story that required an urgent correction. I expect I'll have stress dreams for a few years about texting back and forth with a source on a T9 keyboard at 8 a.m., frantically scouring the number pads for the right letters. 

I was surprised by how much attention my Nokia drew. Strangers approached me and started conversations. Sometimes, they ask to take pictures with my phone. 

"I f-king hate alt boys, man," one acquaintance said when I pulled out my phone. 

Turning point

I should mention that depending on how you look at it, I cheated. I didn't sell my iPhone, and I didn't lock it in a safe. I kept it, and I continue to use it in a limited capacity when I'm at home and connected to Wi-Fi. Like Kevin Gates, I have two phones now. I use Wi-Fi to make WhatsApp calls with friends abroad, and I check my iMessage group chats in the morning and at night. Although I'm a bit ashamed to admit it, I still scroll through Instagram for a few minutes when I wake up, and I listen to podcasts in the shower. Oh well. 

Even so, for the first three weeks, I teetered on the verge of quitting, mostly because of the aforementioned challenges. But around week four, something clicked. Or rather, several things clicked at once. Muscle memory took over, and T9 texting became a breeze - a little fun, even. Now, I text quickly enough to hold a conversation. And I figured out workarounds. I connected my Clipper card to my Lyft account, which allowed me to unlock e-bikes without a smartphone. Some inconveniences remained, but they stopped bothering me. 

And I started to enjoy myself. There's a certain type of exhilaration I feel when I step outside on a weekend day with just my flip phone, my wallet, my house keys and a half-formed idea of where I'm headed. At the risk of sounding corny, excursions turn into minor adventures. I walk into delis without consulting Yelp. I ask strangers for directions. I get lost. I lose track of time. The world is just a tiny bit more enchanting than it used to be.

For many, smartphones are too deeply enmeshed in working life to make abandoning them entirely a viable possibility. Without mine, I wouldn't be able to work; I can only access my SFGATE email with the help of a two-factor authentication app on my iPhone. For work trips, I need a smartphone to communicate with editors via Slack. In a pinch, I switch my SIM card back to my iPhone, which I do before reporting on festivals and out of town events. I'm always relieved to switch back to my Nokia when the weekend is over. 

I've learned not to let perfect be the enemy of good enough. When acquaintances see my Nokia, I often hear some variation of the same refrain: "I wish I could do that, but I just can't give up [Spotify or iMessage or Uber or WhatsApp or Google Maps]." 

I thought so too. But as it turns out, I missed almost nothing about carrying an iPhone wherever I went. 

Instead of using Spotify, I download complete albums onto my SD card. When I bike to a new address, I write down the directions on the back of my hand. (My Nokia does have Google Maps, but it's buggy, slow and generally only useful as a last resort.) When I'm out late, my generous friends call the Ubers; when I get home, I open Venmo on my laptop to pay them. I always carry cash. I often carry a notebook, where I write down my calendar appointments. I always carry my physical Clipper card. I read the news on my lunch breaks.

Really, the only thing I miss about my iPhone is its beautiful, high-definition camera. 

You, too, can ruin your life

After four months, my flip phone elevator pitch goes something like this:

I used to wonder whether I'd ever be able to watch a sunset, uninterrupted, without itching to reach for my phone. Now I don't. For 10 years, I wondered whether I was capable of peeling myself away from my screen. Now I don't. I used to chastise myself for my lack of self-control. Now I don't. Rarely do problems that appear permanent have such simple, immediate solutions. 

I'm not sure I'm more productive or less stressed. I'm not sure I sleep better. But I'm far less frustrated than I was before. And a bit happier, I think, if you can even measure that sort of thing.

"Tbh, getting free from that compulsive scrolling wasn't just about deleting apps. It was about rebuilding my relationship with myself. Learning how to sit with boredom."

When I sit down on the toilet, I still instinctively pull out my Nokia, the same way that I used to pull out my iPhone. But the difference is that now, there's nothing to look at. Sometimes, I check my texts. If I have my (wired) headphones, I'll play music. Occasionally, I'll flip my phone open and close it, over and over, until I get bored. 

Finally, I just sit and stare at the wall. For a moment, the quiet is jarring, but I'm getting used to it.