Brain Rot: Can using a less ‘smart’ phone help? This reporter tested

Dear readers, I have a confession: I am suffering from a disease that youngest call “brain rot” Or brain deterioration, the inability to think deeply after a long time rolling the feed on my phone. Nowadays, it’s hard to finish a book.

Many people have this problem. So many, a category of minimalist technological products that seek to get rid of distractions, from Ai Pin, the now extinct artificial intelligence lapel pin that made notes, to phones with only basic resources.

The latest example is the Light Phone IIIwhich costs $ 600 and is from a New York startup. It is a simplified phone that almost does nothing. The newer, pre-launched version in March and that should have a broader release in July, can make calls, send text messages, take photos, show directions on the map, play music and podcasts and do not do much more.

There is no web browser. There is also no app store, which means there is no Uber to call a car, no slack or social networks. There is not even email. “You use it when you need it, and when you guard it, it disappears from your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, CEO of Light, the startup that has developed several Light Phone iterations over the past nine years. “Many customers say they feel less stressed and more productive and creative.”

I was curious to see if Light Phone could heal me from “Brain Rot”, so I used it as my main phone for a week. There were times when I liked him. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to look at the phone screen and felt more attentive to my surroundings. The calls sounded clear and clear.

The map application did a good job guiding me around the city. This reminded me of simpler times, when we used the phones mainly to talk before keeping them to focus on other tasks.

But throughout the week, the disadvantages of a simpler phone have been undermining my pleasure, and overall I felt more stressed and less capable. Suddenly I found myself unable to enter a train station, look for the name of a new restaurant or control the door of my garage.

Part of it has less to do with Light Phone itself, which is a median product, and more to do with society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone resources.

Here is how it was my week running to solve tasks, moving and going out with a phone with less technology.

Starting

When I set my light Phone over the weekend, the phone, which looks like a black rectangular slab, was quite basic. The phone menu was a black screen showing a list of resource in white text: phone, camera, photo album and alarm. To add more tools, I had to use a web browser to my computer to access a panel where I could install features such as a map, notepad and timer app. Now that I was ready to start, I was determined to live, at least for a while, without my iPhone.

Going to work

On Monday morning, I started my travel to work, taking a train from Oakland, California, to San Francisco. When I arrived at the station, I realized that I could not enter without my iPhone because, years ago, I converted my physical transport pass to a virtual stored in my smartphone’s moving wallet. Light Phone didn’t have a mobile wallet to load the virtual transport card, so I came home to get my iPhone and ended up arriving at the office half an hour late.

At the gym

I faced a similar problem one night at my climbing gym. To enter, members use their phones to log in to the gym’s website and generate a temporary barcode that is scanned at the entrance. Since Light Phone didn’t have a web browser, I couldn’t create a barcode, so I had to wait in the reception line.

Sending messages to friends and taking pictures

I added some of my closest friends to the Light Phone contact list and sent text messages explaining my experiment. Typing on the device keyboard looked slow, in part because there was no automatic correction feature to correct typing errors. As a result, the conversations were short.

Something funny came when I sent photos to people. Poorly lit and granulated, the images seemed to have been produced with a phone camera at least 15 years ago.

“Retro!” Said a friend in response to a blurred photo of my daughter. “Wow, this is bad,” said another friend about a poorly lit photo of my Corgi, Max. Light founders said they were proud of the Light Phone camera, which has a nostalgic touch.

Solving Tasks

One afternoon, I had to return an Amazon product in a UPS store. I chose the most convenient shipping option, which involved showing a QR code for scanning. The problem? Light Phone had no email app or web browser to download the code. Instead, I loaded it on my computer screen and took a mediocre photo with the phone. When I took the package to UPS and introduced the photo, held my breath, waiting for the image to be clear enough. The UPS employee held the scanner and, after three attempts, I heard a beep and a shipping label was printed. What a relief, but also, what a disorder.

Lunch

On another afternoon, my wife and I left for a makeshift lunch. I took the garage car and then I had to ask my wife to use his iPhone to close our garage door with the Myq app. (Our physical control has stopped working for years.)

So we were trying to remember the name of a new sushi restaurant we had recently read on a food blog. I couldn’t access the blog post on Light Phone. We ended up in the wrong restaurant. However, it was good to have lunch together without the temptation to check my email.

Conclusion

Although I admire the goal of Light Phone, my experience shows that there is nothing we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times.

Many aspects of our lives, including how we move around the city, work, pay for things, and control appliances, revolve around our highly capable smartphones.

This experiment with Light Phone reminded me of glamping: Pay a lot to have an artificially worse experience.

I can’t think of many people whose jobs would allow them to use a light Phone as their only phone. Many of us depend on tools like slack and email to communicate us.

Light Phone may be more suitable as a secondary weekend leisure telephone number so that people disconnect when they are out of work. But even so, camera quality can be a decisive factor for some.

Tang, CEO of Light, acknowledged that Light Phone was not for everyone, but added that parents considered buying the phone for their children so that they were less distracted at school. The company is also working to add more tools such as mobile payments and the ability to order a Lyft car.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.