by It’s almost enough to stop you doomscrolling: dull devices are now cool.
The Boring Phone is a new featureless flip phone that is feeding the appetite of the growing youth who want to ditch their smartphones in favor of dumb phones.
The latest model is a collaboration between beer Heineken and fashion retailer Bodega, and it caused a storm when it was unveiled this month at Milan design week, where trends are anointed by the world’s designers. The Boring Phone is part of a new dumbphone boom, built on gen Z’s skepticism towards the data and attention grabbing technologies they grew up with. That skepticism has fueled the revival of retro-cultural artefacts – a trend known as Newtro – and seen in the revival of vinyl records, cassettes, fanzines, 8-bit video games and old-fashioned mobile phones.
“I always hate being available to everyone,” said Rana Ali. The 29-year-old former finance worker, now a music producer and rapper recording as Surya Sen, said: “The idea is that if you send a WhatsApp to someone and they don’t respond immediately then something is wrong. I’ve had periods where I’ve had a smartphone but I always go back to having a burner phone.”
Nostalgia for the Nokia 3310, the “brick” phone with seemingly eternal battery life, prompted its relaunch in 2017, but the boom really started in the US last year and, ironically, it was TikTokers posting under the hashtag #bringbackflipphones encourage him. Flip phone sales by HMD, which was behind the relaunch of Nokia, doubled by April 2023, and Punkt, which prefers to be called sexy or minimalist phones, has also seen a significant increase in sales.
But Apple and Samsung are not under threat yet, according to Mintel. Nine out of 10 phones are smartphones and dumbphones are still a niche, said Joe Birch, a technology analyst at the research firm.
“However, there is evidence that this generation is changing their smartphone behaviour, and this is being driven by concerns about the negative consequences of being digitally connected at all times,” said Birch. “Three out of five gen-Zers say they want to be less connected to the digital world, for example.”
This shift to the offline, or digital minimum, is also seen in gen Z’s declining use of social media. They are the only generation whose time on social media has fallen since 2021, according to GWI, another research company, although older people are also digitally detoxing – including Lars Silberbauer, HMD’s chief marketing officer . “For the first four hours, you’re a little worried,” he said. “But then all of a sudden you start focusing and you go back to the behaviors you used to have.”
Twenty things are also more worrying about privacy, according to the technology analyst Portulans Institute, in an internet that seems more like a surveillance tool for brands, governments and scammers than a place to pursue interests and find interesting people.
Older technologies can create more freedom: sampling in hip-hop and dance music is almost impossible for emerging artists, since Spotify or YouTube algorithms will see non-cleared samples and prevent tracks from being uploaded . But an underground artist can press 500 vinyl EPs and sell them to DJs and fans without difficulty.
The problem with lining up is that the world is getting harder for people without a smartphone. There are 2.4m households in the UK who cannot afford a mobile phone contract and 2 million young people who do not have access to a learning device, said Hannah Whelan, coordinator of the Data Poverty Lab at the charity Good Things Foundation. “Most essential services are now online – education, healthcare, universal credit,” she said. People who can’t scan a QR code to fill out a form or order food are at least at a disadvantage, and some systems require them.
Related: Over the past five years, my flip phone has changed my life. Yes, I get lost a lot
The Luddite Club, a group of New York schoolchildren who announced in December 2022 that they were giving up their iPhones in favor of flip phones, would still need their smartphones, said Petter Neby, founder of Punkt. “It’s impossible,” he said. “In UK schools you’re talking about banning the smartphone but you have a school system that relies on online activity, for scheduling, for homework. I would love to ban smartphones from my kids, but it’s a much deeper issue. We have to have a balance.”
Piers Garrett, a 27-year-old technology sales executive, tried to strike that balance by getting a Light Phone – a device that uses the same electronic ink used for e-readers and has no apps – but for he eventually gave up.
“The idea was great, but I only lasted six months,” he said. “Everyone communicates through WhatsApp. So now I have a happy medium. I’m very strict with my apps – only banking apps and train apps, and I turn off all my ads. Now when I wake up in the morning, I do things for myself – get a coffee, read a book. And I noticed the change – much clearer in my mind.”
