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I've failed the no-smartphone life (forum.uncomfortable.business)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So, after like 8 months of dumbphone only, I've given up.

It wasn't one majorly annoying thing, but just a non-stop death by a thousand cuts. Modern life really requires at least possession of one of these stupid little rectangles, and if you don't have one, you get slowly nibbled to death by the ducks of modernity.

So, rather than redouble my efforts to bend the world to dealing with me wanting to be a bit of a luddite weirdo, I've given up and just..... bought an iPhone SE and paired it with an Apple Watch 8 I already had.

See, the thing I really didn't consider is that I pretty much already had the ideal dumbphone: this AW8 is a cellular version.

It does phone calls, text messages, and has sufficient ties to modern services (music, podcasts, audiobooks, maps, etc.) that it is, by itself, a 60% solution. And just for perfect clarity: there's a lot of things wrong with the watch that make it not an ideal device, with the biggest one being really not fantastic battery life.

For everything the watch doesn't do, I also have the phone, but the phone isn't strictly required, and I can simply leave it at home when I don't want to deal with all the modern smartness and just rely on the watch.

For sure, it's not a cheap solution since an iPhone and a cellular watch is a giant investment even if you go for the "cheapest" versions, and I'm paying for two cellular plans (though, with US Mobile it's $96/year for each so, relatively speaking, still pretty cheap).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I have Audiobookshelf running too, and all of my audiobooks are collections of mp3 files (numbered properly by either Libation or downloaded directly from Libro.fm).

I'm not sure where this "wants single-file variants" comes from.

The Shelf works fine with separate mp3s.

And I love T9 typing so much, I've installed the Type Nine keyboard on my iPhone.

But I could never live the dumb phone life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I’m not sure where this “wants single-file variants” comes from.

I was having issues with pirated audiobooks stopping playback, being unable to resume playback, and losing playback status and location all the damn time, though this was a while ago.

The suggestion was to take these random audiobooks and condense them into one file, instead of the 15 tracks per disk, 20 disks per book mess they were, and sure enough that completely fixed the problem.

If it's no longer an issue, cool, but for a while playback from books in lots and lots and lots of parts was flaky as fuck.