K Sawyer Paul

Smart Phone vs Minimal Phone

I want to begin by sharing Becca Farsace’s video about comparing modern smart phones to modern minimal/dumb phones. I liked her take a lot, and the video is worth watching.

I’m not even close to the only person around who finds modern technology less phone, less interesting, and less interesting to talk about than in the past. I’ve noticed that talking about tech, gadgets, etc doesn’t come up as often in casual conversation even among my friends who were obsessed with this stuff not too long ago.

Becca comes to a conclusion I haven’t seen too often, though: these minimal devices are aggravating to use. As much as it’s fun to watch videos of people using older technology, I could not go back to a T9 keyboard. I don’t want to use a phone with an e-ink screen. I do not want to pay half the price of a smart phone for 1/100th of its utility.

Smart Watch vs Minimal Watch

I’ve been an Apple Watch user since 2020. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if I could go without it, so I ran an experiment. I factory reset the dingus and placed it in a drawer. My iPhone’s fitness app immediately changed: it went from displaying three activity rings to one, a singular “move” ring.

I also took this as an opportunity to try a watch I’d been eyeing for a while, a Casio WS-B1000. It had been reviewed on the Verge last year. In the review, Victoria Song wrote:

these days, I’m at a point in my fitness journey where I’m recovering from mental and physical burnout from prolonged overtraining. It is a frustratingly long process, and to my surprise, the thing that’s kept me going are devices and apps that prioritize rest and simplicity over “going hard.”

Here’s what I liked about the Casio WS-B1000.

• The Casio app makes all the fiddly stuff on an old watch much easier to program. You can have it sync the time, alarms, and step count goals on a big screen instead of trying to figure out Casio’s ancient button press math that never makes any sense.
• I like that they made the main button more fun to press than the other buttons, some real Gamecube Controller thinking there.
• It’s a real set it-and-forget it gadget, and Victoria is correct that it removes a lot of the video gamey motivation that smart watches utilize.
• Good light, but I never really needed to use it.
• Battery lasts years.
• Half the weight of Apple Watch.
• It’s an inexpensive enough watch that only using it for an experiment felt doable.

After two weeks with the Casio, I find myself placing it in the same category as Becca’s minimal phones: there are too many rough trade-offs here for it to be my primary watch.

Here’s what I did not like:

• Yes, you can sync the step data, but you have to to do it — by holding down the bluetooth button for a few seconds and opening the Casio app, like an animal.
• The step reminder would go off at random, inconvenient times, annoying the people around me. So I turned the watch to silent a few days in, making the step reminder useless. I missed the “taptic” notifications on my wrist for stuff like this.
• The alarm beeps like twice, then stops, begging you to set multiple alarms in the morning. I found it not loud enough for the morning, but too loud during the day. (this one is very subjective)
• Poor viewing angle. Your wrist needs to be rotated pretty far to be able to see the time, otherwise your eyes just see a string of 8’s.
• I was annoyed that I couldn’t see the date and the step tracking at the same time.

Aesthetically, it’s not like Casio watches are visual treats. They are utilitarian 80s-style watches with some nostalgia appeal for me, but this appeal is narrow. I received some compliments on it, but just as many unimpressed notes. Why swap one computer watch for another, less-useful computer watch? It doesn’t even have Snoopy. As dull as Apple’s design UI might be, at least they have Snoopy.

Internal Motivation vs External Motivation

The main thing I’m taking away from my experiment is that I’m not very motivated by myself. I work well with deadlines and budgets, with Apple Watch goals, with people expecting something of me. I don’t do much if I’m alone. It makes me a good freelancer and worker, but maybe not a self-starter.

I think back on some old Merlin Mann advice. I’m paraphrasing because I couldn’t find the exact quote, but he said something to the likes of “if a project doesn’t have both a deadline and a budget, it’s not getting done.”

What I’ve really got to work on is finding the right external motivations and working them into my daily life. This is a noise problem, and something I’m going to write about more in a future blog.

My Plan For Apple Watch Going Forward

Here are some things I noticed about using an iPhone without an Apple Watch for the first time in five years:

• iPhone’s built-in move ring is nearly impossible to pass by itself if you keep it at the same number you had under the watch. I didn’t complete it once. This is either an evil dark pattern by Apple to make you buy a watch, or my number was too high.
• I hate the iPhone alarm by itself. I really did miss waking up with Apple Watch’s alarm.
• If you have Apple Watch friends and they share their workouts with you, you get notifications on the iPhone. If you have an Apple Watch, you only get these notifications on the watch. I vastly preferred seeing these on the phone, because I often miss them on the watch notification list.
  • This bullet point made me realize how little I use Apple Watch for notifications, and gave me an idea on how to use it in the future.

To return to the beginning of this blog post, Becca made a wonderful point about smart phones: we can — using our willpower — remove the casino aspect of our smart phones and make them more like tools, if we want. And maybe that’s what I need to do with Apple Watch.

I was getting frustrated by Apple Watch being bad things I wanted it to be good at. It had apps for email, messages, music, and tasks, but I found using any of them on the watch annoying and time consuming. I should accept that, like a lot of people and Apple themselves, the Watch is great for two things: glanceable information and collecting health data that you look at on your phone. It is not, at least for me, a secret tiny wrist computer.