Anti-Smartphone Phone Launched For Technophobes

geek4 writes "A Dutch company has launched what it calls 'the world's simplest phone,' targeting users who are sick of new-generation models. Only capable of making and receiving calls, John's Phone is dubbed the world's simplest mobile phone, specifically designed for anti-smartphones users. It does not provide any hi-tech features. No apps. No Internet. No camera. No text messaging. All you have to do — in fact, all you can do — is call, talk and hang up."

Comments

Expensive Price

[Sonny Yatsen]

Is it me or does £60 to £80, or about $95 to $127 dollars seem extremely overpriced for a phone with essentially no features?

Re:Expensive Price

[Sonny Yatsen]

What I mean is, there's almost no expensive components in this phone. Heck, it doesn't even have a screen. All it needs is the simplest or the cheapest microprocessors that is capable of making a call. Yet, it still costs £60 to £80.

Re:Expensive Price

[treeves]

100% pure water is ... dangerous for your health

Please don't spread this lie. If you rely on water to get all the carbonates, chlorides, sodium, calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, etc. that you need, you probably should try eating food!

If I drink a glass of water with no ions in it except hydronium and hydroxyl, it will cease to be so as soon as it touches my mouth, and if you tell me that it will leach out all the minerals in my body, that would be true of any water that contains a lower concentration of those ions than the fluid in my body does, but it would be hard to drink enough water for that to matter. Your body (specifically your kidneys) does a good job of maintaining homeostasis and keeping the electrolytes it needs and getting rid of the rest, whether you drink water with 50ppm of sodium chloride or water with zero electrolytes.

As for the taste, you're right.
But that's all it is. A matter of taste.

Technophobes?

[fahrbot-bot]

Condescending much?

How about for people you don't need extra stuff/crap and just want a fucking phone? I'm a Unix/Windows SA and systems programmer with 4 computers at home (Windows and Linux) and have managed everything from Crays to PC - so, hardly a technophobe - and I still use my Qualcomm QCP-1900 from 1998. It cost me $200 with no-contract and my service is still $15/month (no contract). The thing still provides 6 hours of talk and two-weeks of standby.

Sure, text and web might be nice - sometime - but I don't really need/want to be that "connected" all the time.

Re:Wait? No phone book?

[rolfwind]

A jitterbug cell phone is what they should have been shooting for:
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/2045/jitterbugcellphone.jpg

It's a basic phone with oversize numbers on the screen, louder than normal speaker, and big buttons, generally geared towards the senior citizen market.

The only problem is the jitterbug isn't a model you can buy (itself based on some Samsung phone iirc) and use on any service but rather an overpriced prepaid service (and I'm not against prepaid).

Re:Easy there nerd boy

[roc97007]

Does anyone actually use speed dial on dumb phones?

Usually it's so complicated to program (and every phone is different) that it's easier just to memorize the damned number.

The biggest change in my life when I switched to a smartphone is that I finally started using the internal address book.

Does this really help technophobes though?

[elysiana]

On the one hand, I can see this being useful for people like my aunt, who have an "emergencies only" cell phone. Easy to understand, no frills, no chance of accidentally going online. I can also see it being useful for those who just don't want to bother with all the extras that are on phones anymore. Even my "dumbphone" has a camera, a media player, texting, and online capabilities, and I don't really need or want all that (Except texting. You can't take away my texting).

On the other hand, I can't help but feel that pandering to an already technophobic crowd only makes their fears seem more substantial (to them, at least). With technology changing so incredibly rapidly, it doesn't seem like the best course of action is to put them in a bubble and tell them it'll be okay, we won't let the bad bad digital phone hurt them. Technological advancements aren't going to go backwards; at some point these people are going to have to learn something new.

Mixed feelings.

Surely not simpler than phones for kids..

[molo]

This phone, the firefly, has just 5 buttons: call mom, call dad, phonebook, call, hangup.

http://www.fireflymobile.com/store/firefly/

-molo