Everyone, in these days, is preoccupied with the glaring slabs of screens a.k.a smartphones. In fact, among my class fellows in college, it is only me who is still using a Candybar with basic internet connectivity. People generally ask me why don't I use a smartphone in this era of technological advancements? Well, there are several reasons for my disdainment with smartphones:
1. It's difficult to type for my cramped hand on a virtual and tiny keyboard.
2. Gigantic screens are troubling to carry in side-pockets of kameez (our South-Asian dress).
3. My feeble hands begin to ache after 15 minutes of using a smartphone constantly because of their weight.
4. Smartphones are distracting and a blow on digital minimalism, if not used with purpose in mind.
5. A long-lasting phone costs more than 25,000 PKR (160 USD). With this amount, I can buy a second-hand Core i5 laptop in which I can run the entire Android system through a virtual machine.
To overcome such obstacles, I use my brother's desktop on scheduled hours for my academic research and my Nokia 225 to skim through Facebook, see emails, read books, listen to the music, to capture memories, as an alarm device to wake me up in the morning and as a torch-light to light up my path (if I ever happen to go outside of my lodgings).
As mentioned above, I primarily use this phone to read books, articles and go through write-ups on Facebook in Opera-Mini. This phone can not only open the full text of Animal Farm, but can store it locally on SD card in the form of a saved page (a feature in Opera Mini to store web pages locally) but 1984 from Project Gutenberg is not something for this "miserably weak creature". For viewing e-mails, I'm limited to use Gmail. E-mail composer is basic and can send text-only emails in the character length of 1024. The same character limit applies to Facebook posts (and messages in Messenger) as well but with an added bonus of attaching 3 photos. Speaking of Facebook, I use its free mode to read write-ups of my favourite profilers and to read books by posting extracts in our book-reading group. With a minute knowledge of coding, I have manually added different search boxes of not just Google but of dictionary which instantly lets me find out meanings and definitions of difficult words by just hitting #9 through the keypad.
Network connectivity of this phone is 2G and it is not bothering. Web pages load at reasonably fast speed thanks to the web-page compression through Opera servers. Although upload speed is not ideal. If I have to transfer an image, I reduce Image-Quality to 1.3 MPx before I hit the Capture button. To browse the internet on this phone, I have subscribed Infinity Bundle @ Rs 50 (0.31 USD) on Mobilink Jazz which has allotted me an incentive of 1 GB for 6 months [Now @ Rs 80 (0.50 USD) with 2 GBs internet for 6 months]. It has been 2.6 months since I subscribed to this bundle and I have only been able to consume 370 MBs!
Speaking of Captures, this phone does a stunning job of capturing images in bright condition or a scene that is lit up naturally or electronically. Although its camera is 2.0 MPx which is way low as compared to an inexpensive smartphone but captures decent images if certain conditions are met. In fact, even at 1.3 MPx, this camera retains handwritings on a notebook. Sadly, its video quality is not so good and records at 360 p @ 15 fps. Despite such visual degrade, a normal 4 minute can consume significant space on SD card. I use HandBrake to encode these high volume videos to lighter ones so that my Google Drive may give me some extra MBs to store more data. Also, I upload every captured photo in Google Photos to keep a secure backup of my moments once a week. However, I have to swap out the memory card and place it into an SD card reader to connect with my brother's computer because for some reason, I do not get prompt of Mass Storage option when I plug this phone to the computer through a USB cable.
I have been a long term user of Nokia 1100 from 2012 to 2018. What I liked the most about Nokia 1100 was the predictive text input through the T9 dictionary. Since Nokia 225 is built on the same software features as its predecessor, this phone is not exempted from the T9 dictionary. Fun fact, the outcome of keystrokes is just the same! But we can use T9 dictionary on pretty much every text field whether it is a normal text message or a file rename text field or a text window in Opera Mini. But as the length of being-typed text increases, so does its input lag. To overcome this issue to some extent, I fall back upon the T9 dictionary.
Music playback and file management of this phone are basic with essential options like Copy, Move, Rename and Delete etc. When this phone is locked, you can still control the volume of being-played track and skip to the next or previous song by using the navigation keys.
The software UI of this phone is based on dark mode which serves no strains on my eye-sight. Similarly, the big font size of time lets me measure time correctly despite my mild visual imparity. As for the other features, this phone can do basic calculations and conversions; can show the counters of the consumed data, SMS and IVR minutes on calls; can store and activate 5 alarms simultaneously; ring a countdown to 23 hours and 59 minutes and a basic stopwatch to count 20 laps of time.
For alarm tone, I've downloaded a one minute loop of silence from Github and activated it through vibrations. It serves its job perfectly after placing it under my sleeping pillow.
Despite many amazing benefits this phone offers, my Snapper has a short life left on the internet. Facebook on Every Phone app no longer works. The HTML version of Twitter will be shut down after 15-Dec-2020. Freebasics has already started displaying Connection forbidden error. Eventually, Facebook, Google, DuckDuckGo, BBC Urdu and 9to5Google will shut down their HTML versions in the coming years.
Despite such a dark future for my phone, it clearly demonstrates that if you have the technical know-how, you can turn an old calling piece into a remarkable helping gadget, which will not only wake you up in time but will prove an awesome literary companion to read books along with.
I haven't owned the 'luxury' of a smartphone but what I own, separates me from the infinite scrollers of Instagram and establishes a unique identity of mine among my fellows and over the internet. I'm pretty sure that when this phone will breathe its last, it will be a suitable time to buy the augmented reality glasses than of smartphones.
