Trying to live without a smartphone in 2026

This article is about my attempts to dump my smartphone. I’ll be asking whether this is even possible these days, or whether smartphones are such a feature of modern life that we just can’t manage without them.

I have to point out that I’m not talking about giving up mobile phones completely. Cellular mobile telephony is a technological marvel, one of the greatest engineering achievements in human history. Mobile telephony isn’t just convenient, it increases safety and security for just about everybody. I can’t even imagine being without a mobile phone these days. In practice, I never am. But do I need to carry around a supercomputer in my pocket?

And that’s what a modern smartphone is, by the standards of only, say, forty years ago. In my childhood, the capabilities of a modern Android handset would have seemed like science fiction. A modern smartphone is a web browser, a media player, a calendar manager, a fitness tracker, a map, a camera, and just about everything else, all packed into a single, relatively affordable, pocket-sized box. As concerned as I am about smartphones, I can’t deny their incredible utility.

So, with them being so useful, why would anybody even consider living without a smartphone? You’d have to be mad, right?

Well, first, there’s the impact that social media has on our mental health, and how smartphones potentially increase that impact.

There are all sorts of reasons to think that a permanently-connected, social media lifestyle isn’t good for our mental well-being. Younger people seem particularly influenced by social media, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Of course, some social media sites are accessible using a desktop computer, rather than a smartphone. What seems to make social media so compulsive, though, and so engaging, is its immediacy. It’s a constant stream of dopamine-releasing stimulation. In practice, social media has the reach it does because we have smartphones. I see social media and smartphones being the two handles of the same poisoned chalice.

Of course, you can have a smartphone without using social media: I do. But some people tell me that they can’t resist the allure of social media if they have it to hand. The fact that smartphones are often supplied with social media apps pre-installed, which can’t be removed, adds to the temptation.

Getting rid of your smartphone may reduce your exposure to social media, but I accept that not everybody sees that as the positive development that I do.

Second, there’s the time-wasting and distraction of smartphones, which is more of a problem for me.

Even without social media, I find myself looking at news sites, checking the weather forecast every ten minutes, playing stupid word games, all far more than I have any need to. I see kids studying, or revising for exams, sitting at their desks with smartphones in their hands. Every time their devices beep – and they seem to beep constantly – they stop what they’re doing, and fondle the screen for a while.

I’m sure younger people are better able to cope with this constant stream of interruptions than I am, but I can’t imagine it improves anybody’s focus. Sometimes I’ll be in a pub, or even at a concert, and find I’m the only person there not poking at my screen. People are often paying more attention to their phones than to the people around them, which seems odd at a social event.

Third, if you’re concerned about your online privacy, you have to be really careful with smartphones. I’ve gone to some lengths to de-Google my smartphone, and to find replacements for Google’s services and other on-line services that siphon off our personal data. Still, I can’t deny that doing without a smartphone altogether would make it a lot easier to manage privacy risks.

While many people believe it’s mostly kids who have a smartphone compulsion, I find it’s the over-50s who are glued most firmly to their screens these days. The folks wandering around with their handsets in front of them, snapping everything up for Instagram, tend to be greybeards like me.

If you browse around the web, you’ll find many, many accounts of people who gave up their smartphones for a few days, or a few weeks. The writers generally rave about the experience, about how it improved self-esteem, and even revitalized their love-lives. Maybe so. But a few weeks isn’t nearly long enough. I’ve been trying to ditch my smartphone for five years and, every time I try, I encounter another reason I can’t. Why? That’s something I’ll come back to at the end.

I’ll admit that this article is really about the ways I use a smartphone, and the alternatives I’ve had to come up with. Still, people use their devices in all sorts of ways, many of which I probably wouldn’t understand even if I knew about them. I’ve met people, many people, who’ve told me they’d like to get rid of their smartphone but can’t, because of this reason and that reason. And, to be fair, some of these are good reasons.

Why we can’t give up our smartphones

So I want to start by considering situations where giving up a smartphone would be difficult to impossible.

There are people who use smartphones for their work, and could hardly work without them. Couriers use smartphone apps for scheduling and parcel tracking. Airline staff use apps for rostering. I’ve seen hospital doctors using smartphones to look up drug doses and side effects. Many people need access to email or video calling when they’re out and about, because that’s how they communicate with clients.

In response, I’d say that even if you need a smartphone for your work, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re forced to use one outside business hours too. It’s possible for most of us to switch the smartphone off at the end of the working day, if we want to. If you have to use a smartphone for business, and you’re concerned about privacy, you can set it up in such a way that it only reveals business details about you, not personal things. You don’t have to handle personal email or messages on it, or use a personal social media account.

The problem is that, if you’ve gotten used to having all the information and entertainment you want on demand, putting the smartphone away at the end of the working day is likely to be difficult. I do sympathise with people in that position, because I’ve been there myself; but I know the situation can be managed.

If you’re a social media junky, though, you’re going to struggle without a smartphone. I don’t use social media, because most of the social media platforms have no respect for privacy. So giving up my smartphone isn’t a huge problem for me in this respect. But I do understand that it would be for some people.

The smartphone addicts for whom I have most sympathy are those who use messaging apps to keep in touch with friends and family. The ability to message a group of people all together can be very useful. We can do the same thing with dumbphones using SMS, particularly now that SMS messaging is essentially free-of-charge. But I won’t deny that the messaging apps are hugely more convenient, and I fully understand why people are drawn to them. Still, I can’t help feeling that most of the information that gets exchanged this way is, frankly, non-essential. People who know me, know to call if it’s urgent.

Dumbphones aren’t so dumb

With those points out of the way, let’s consider what you don’t have to give up, if you swap your smartphone for a contemporary dumbphone. I believe the modern, polite term for for the kind of communications device that isn’t a pocket supercomputer is “feature phone”, but that makes no sense to me, and I prefer “dumbphone”.

I’ve been experimenting with the 2nd-generation Nokia 105, which is a modern take on the Nokia “brick” phones of the 90s. Although it looks the same, the 105 actually has a heap of modern features. It supports USB-C fast charging, Bluetooth, both wired and wireless headsets, and all the 4G calling standards, including voice-over-LTE. So audio quality in calls is outstanding.

There’s an audio player which can play music and audiobook files from an SD card, a calendar, a contact manager, multiple alarms, and an FM radio. Battery life is measured in weeks – much better than any smartphone I’ve used. The 105 doesn’t have a camera, but the 110 does, for a few pounds more. But, in deference to its heritage, it does have the infamous “snake” game.

I was expecting to find that I needed to enter all my contact phone numbers again, from the keypad, when I started using the 105. But, in fact, it was able to download my full contact list from my Android phone over Bluetooth. The dumbphone turned out to be smarter than I expected.

This simple, cheap phone does almost everything I use my smartphone for, and it does it for – wait for it – £12. How can Nokia make and sell this thing for twelve quid, when it’s not even locked to a carrier? I have no idea. The 105 provides few opportunities for time-wasting, apart from “Snake” perhaps, and it creates no privacy concerns.

Does it do everything it does as well as a smartphone would?

Well, sadly, no. That’s the problem. Its main limitation is that it has only a 2-inch screen, and it’s not touch-sensitive. So it’s pretty slow to operate the device using the tiny keypad. Entering text is a real drag; I suspect most of us have forgotten, if we ever knew, what a pain it is to enter text using a numeric keypad. I’ve found that it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to get dumbphones with large touch-screens. Any such device tends to run Android or some other heavyweight, privacy-busting operating system.

So that’s what I can do on a dumbphone, in addition to telephony, of course. Now let’s look at some of the things I really can’t do, and this will be a fairly long list, I’m sorry to say. And the list of things you can’t do might be even longer: you might use your smartphone in ways I haven’t even dreamed of.

Mapping and navigation

Let’s start with the biggest issue for me: mapping. I don’t use Google Maps because, you know, Google; but there are plenty of alternatives that work nicely on my de-Googled Android phone. There’s no problem navigating in my car without a smartphone: it’s got a built-in satnav which is miles better than any navigation app, with a much larger screen.

Navigation out in the hills isn’t really a problem either, because I have a Garmin pocket GPS designed specifically for hiking. Unlike a smartphone it has a daylight-viewable screen, and a 50-hour battery life. It takes common AA batteries, which my phone doesn’t, so I can carry a couple of spares. It’s a reassuring bright yellow colour, so I can find it if I drop it. It’s waterproof and it floats, which is crucial if the place I drop it happens to be a river. It’s altogether a better outdoor navigation companion that a smartphone could ever could be. At a pinch I can even get a grid reference from my fitness tracker, and find my location on a paper map.

My smartphone, on the other hand, is a very poor outdoor navigation aid. It only gets about six hours of battery life when using GPS heavily – perhaps less with the screen on all the time – and I doubt it would survive a fall onto rocky ground, much less into a river. This is an example of how a smartphone is OK for many things, but it’s not excellent at anything – not compared to a single-purpose device. But I’ve gotten used to using my smartphone for navigation, because I’ve always had it with me. To use my Garmin GPS, I have to remember to pack it.

Without a smartphone, my real mapping and navigation problems are in town. I’ve got used to pulling out my smartphone to navigate unfamiliar urban areas. If I don’t have one, I have to buy printed maps, or print my own map of the area from my web browser. This is what I did thirty years ago, and I don’t think it’s the end of the world to have to do it now. A paper map is easier to read in direct sunlight than a smartphone screen; it’s user interface is a simple as it can possibly be; and paper doesn’t have batteries to run out. But it’s certainly less convenient than a smartphone and, more importantly, printing a map requires forward planning: something I’m not always good at.

In short, I can manage without a smartphone for navigation, and there are certain advantages to doing so. But I can’t deny the convenience of the smartphone.

Photography and videography

Your best photos, I’m told, are the ones you actually take. The key to getting great pictures, the photo-journalists tell us, is “f/8 and be there”.

There’s no doubt I’ve taken photos with my smartphone that I wouldn’t have taken otherwise, because I wouldn’t have had my camera with me. Are these photos as good as the ones I’d have taken if I did have my proper camera? Not in any technical sense: a decent digital SLR camera with decent lenses will take photos that are hugely superior to anything you’ll get from a smartphone camera.

You might not realize this if you only look at photos on a phone screen. You really need to see them printed A3 size and framed, to realise what a difference there is between phone snaps and the output of a real camera. Or you could try zooming into a small region of a photo and magnifying it twenty times, at which point the noisiness of a phone’s camera sensor will reveal itself all too clearly.

But, for all that, I got the shots, and I’m quite pleased with them. So long as I don’t look at them on anything larger than a desktop monitor, the quality is acceptable to me. They’re pictures I wouldn’t have had, if I hadn’t had my phone in my pocket.

Some dumbphones do have a camera but, so far, I’ve not found one whose camera is as good as even a bottom-of-the-range smartphone. Still, a dumbphone camera would be be fine if you just needed to photograph the licence plate of the car that’s just driven into you. It’s for real photography they fall short.

With a bit of work, a smartphone camera can take surprisingly good photos, particularly outdoors with a well-lit subject. Sure, it won’t match a DSLR camera, but it’ll be good enough for most purposes. Some reputable art schools even offer courses specifically in smartphone photography.

On the other hand, my Sony pocket camera takes much better pictures than a smartphone camera, and it’s scarcely bigger than a phone. It fits easily into a coat pocket, and it takes less than half a second from pulling it out of my pocket to capturing the shot. Still, I find I use it less these days, because I have to remember to take it with me, which means I have to have photography in mind. In practice, my smartphone is always with me, whether I’m thinking about photography or not.

Again, we see how a smartphone can do a lot of things adequately, but it doesn’t do anything as well as a purpose-built device. But the purpose-built device is only useful if you actually have it with you.

In short, not having a smartphone means I take fewer photos. The ones I do take are better, but perhaps I’ve missed my best shots by not being there. And, of course, I can only take photos at all because I do actually have an alternative camera; in fact, I have several. When I’m not carrying a smartphone, perhaps I’m more likely to remember to bring one of them. Maybe.

So, among all the reasons I have for finding it difficult to dump my smartphone, the lack of a camera isn’t the most significant. It’s not even in the top half of the list.

Fitness tracking

So let’s think about another topic dear to my heart: fitness tracking.

I’m quite keen on regular exercise – at my age, I have to be, if I want to see next Christmas. I use a Garmin fitness watch to record my training, and to monitor my heart rate and whatnot. Most people who use devices like this, use them with a smartphone app. Almost certainly the app will send all your health metrics off to some corporation, which you have to trust not to abuse it. Not having a smartphone means I can’t use such an app, even if I wanted to take this risk with the privacy of my health data. And, frankly, I don’t.

What I can do, though, is to download the exercise data from my watch onto my computer, and use alternative software to look at it. Garmin’s fitness watches store data in a well-documented format, so it isn’t hard to find software to view it. I also use some software I wrote myself, to monitor things I’m particularly interested in.

Using a fitness tracker with a smartphone app is certainly convenient but, if you’re a reasonably technically-minded person, you can manage without the smartphone, unless you’re one of these people that likes to share your latest running performance with the world.

Taxis

We’ve gotten used to being able to summon a lift using a smartphone app, and the drivers who operate that way charge a bit less than traditional cab firms. Happily, there are plenty of taxis in my neighbourhood I can hire with a phone call, or just by flagging them down in the street. They’re a bit more expensive than Uber, though. I imagine in large towns you’ll always be able to flag down a cab outside the railway station or whatever, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find the app-based ride-sharing businesses edging out established cab firms before long.

Parking

If I’m not taking a taxi, perhaps I’m driving my own car, which leads to the vexed topic of parking.

I’ve found that that parking in urban car parks is increasingly a problem without a smartphone. Many parking operators are moving away from cash payment to app-based charging schemes. Some provide an alternative way to make payment, perhaps by a telephone call, but some don’t. I’ve found it a particular problem in the London suburbs, for some reason.

Parking operators say they do this to save money, but I’m not seeing any of those alleged savings being passed on to consumers. In fact, parking in my neighbourhood is getting more and more expensive, the more difficult it is to make the payment.

So far, I’ve rarely had a terrible problem finding somewhere to park. There’s usually some place that’s either free of charge, or where I can pay with coins, even if it’s further from where I ideally want to be. When this situation gets worse, I guess I’ll use my bicycle more. And I should do that, anyway.

In the long term, though – I just don’t know. I’m hoping that these changes will be rolled back when there are enough complaints, but I’m not confident. People with mobility problems, in particular, are going to struggle if they don’t want to pay for parking using a smartphone.

Calendars and appointment managers

I’ve got used to having my calendar, contacts, and appointment list on my smartphone, and have it synchronize with my on-line calendar provider – which isn’t Google because, you know, Google. I can still access my calendar and appointments from a desktop computer, and I still get warned by email if I have an appointment coming up. But when I’m out and about, without a smartphone I have to carry a paper notebook and a pen, or at least an old envelope to write on. Then I have to transfer any contact and appointment information that I wrote down to my computer manually.

I’m investigating other ways to handle this kind of task, that don’t involve a smartphone. To be honest, though, I wrote my appointments on paper for decades, before computers became portable. Carrying a diary does have a certain retro charm. But I miss an awful lot of appointments. That’s because what a paper diary won’t do is to alert me when I have an appointment coming up. To some extent I’ve been using my smartphone as a substitute for proper planning, but I do miss the convenience.

Social and cultural events

Another aspect of life where I’ve noticed a disturbing rise in the use of smartphone apps is for booking social events and entertainment.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many bars, restaurants, and concert venues stopped taking money face-to-face, in favour of remote payment. This was reasonable enough at the time – physical money carries germs, after all. Generally, you’d book online and get a barcode or a QR code that could be displayed on a smartphone screen, which you’d present at the venue.

Sadly, even though Covid is no longer the horror it once was, many businesses have continued to operate the same way, and cash on the door is no longer as welcome as it once was.

Sometimes the booking code – the barcode or QR code or whatever – arrives by email as well by app, and can be printed. This is somewhat inconvenient, particularly if you don’t have a printer, but its fine for me. Sometimes, though, there’s only an app. My de-Googled smartphone probably won’t be able to install the app, even if I were willing to use it.

There aren’t many places I want to go to badly enough to break my resolution to avoid smartphone apps. I like to hope that businesses will eventually realize they’re losing custom – and they’re certainly losing mine – and behave more inclusively. After all, I’m told that 20% of the UK’s population doesn’t have a smartphone. Perhaps that’s a small proportion, but it’s still a large number.

Airline travel

A particularly pernicious example of this kind of app-based booking is starting to affect airline travel.

I recently flew from Bergen in Norway to Amsterdam. This was the first time I’ve encountered an airport that seemed to be completely unstaffed. The baggage drop and check-in were completely automated, and driven by bar-codes. I’d checked in on-line the day before, and I’d printed my bar-code on paper, so it was fine. But if I hadn’t had a printer available, and didn’t have a smartphone to display the bar-code, I’m not sure what I’d have done.

There must – surely – have been a staffed check-in desk somewhere, but I didn’t see one. This wasn’t a problem I had at Heathrow. Although there’s little to be said in favour of Heathrow Airport, it is at least staffed, and I’ve been able to check in my bags without an app.

I don’t fly often, and I imagine I’ll fly even less when there’s no way to do it without a smartphone.

Music and media

Before steam starts coming out of my ears, let’s turn to a less depressing subject: playing music.

A modern smartphone makes a great audio player, and a reasonable movie player, if you have good eyesight. Back in the day, this was the province of iPods and portable media players, and there was a huge market.

Right now, if there’s an inexpensive, portable music player that handles both locally-stored files (in modern, lossless formats) and remote streaming services, I haven’t found one. My Astell and Kern music player can do both these things fantastically well, but it’s hardly portable unless you have huge pockets, and it’s certainly not cheap.

This is why I’ve repurposed a small Android phone as kind of contemporary iPod. I’ve stripped out all the software that isn’t concerned with playing music, so it boots in a few seconds, and has a week-long battery life even if I leave it switched on, which I don’t need to. It doesn’t have a web browser and can’t install apps, so I’m prevented from using it for smartphone time-wasting. This is a job for an enthusiast, though, and a nerdy one at that.

It’s a shame nobody seems to make a decent, affordable portable media player these days. It’s hardly surprising, given the ubiquity of smartphones, but it’s still disappointing. My Nokia dumbphone has an audio player, which works fine for locally-stored MP3 files. I don’t think it supports anything except MP3, and its user interface is a bit funky, to say the least; but it does work. It’s not so good for audiobooks, though – navigating long audio recordings using a numeric keyboard is a bear.

Still, if you don’t want to convert a smartphone into an iPod, there are still portable media players around – they just aren’t very good, for the most part. The decent ones all run Android, anyway. And I still have to remember to have my media player with me, for it to be any use at all.

So where does that leave me?

I think perhaps a pattern is starting to emerge here. Most of the things I did with my smartphone, I can do in other ways, at least for the time being. Almost everything I used my smartphone for, I can do with something else. That may some other piece of technology, but it might just be a pocket diary and a pencil.

It just requires better organization. When I leave the house, I have to think what additional gadgets to bring with me. Then I have to find them, make sure their batteries are charged, make sure they still work, and so on. And that’s the problem: I can accept a measure of inconvenience, but only some much. I use SMS messaging all the time, for example, and it’s a real drag, having to key in text using the number keypad on my dumbphone.

With my Android phone completely de-Googled, running an open-source operating system with only open-source apps, I think I have the privacy concerns mostly covered. My Google-free smartphone is approaching the dumbphone-with-touch-screen that I earlier complained about being unable to buy. But I still tend to waste time on it. Because I spend so much time outdoors, I still check the weather forecast ten times a day, even though the forecasts are rarely accurate. I still check my news feed regularly to reassure myself that world war three hasn’t broken out. I still respond to the little flashing light that tells me somebody has sent me an email, which is all the time.

In the end, it ought to be easier for me to give up my smartphone than it is for other people: I don’t use social media, I don’t play video games, and I have alternative ways of doing most of the things I do with a smartphone. I’m old enough to remember how to live without a smartphone, and I’m willing to accept a measure of inconvenience. And yet, I just keeping coming back to my smartphone.

I can’t deny that part of my inability to ditch the smartphone comes down to a lack of self-control, as I suspect it does for many of us. Perhaps I’m seeking a technological solution for something that isn’t a technological problem. I’m trying to keep my smartphone in a different room when I’m at home, so I’m not tempted to look at it every ten minutes. In reality, I know that I wouldn’t need a smartphone, if I were better organized and more self-disciplined.

In the end, this may all be moot. We’re moving towards a society where smartphones are as essential as, well, cars. I struggled to manage without a car for years, but in the end I had to give in. We’ve built a society, for better or worse, that only works if everybody has a car. I fear it might not be long before normal life is impossible without a smartphone. We can only hope that, before that day comes, we all realise how dangerous they are, and our governments act to regulate their worst abuses.