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 Huge phones
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Apparently my cellphone's battery is finally dying, and I'm
considering switching to a new phone this year. The battery can be
replaced (although not easily), but I didn't like this phone much from
the beginning. It's my first smartphone with a touchscreen, and I
didn't use it as a smartphone, but merely for voice calls and SMS. The
battery was pretty good when it was new (5 A*h), but it's heavy
(200 g) and large (145 * 74 * 11 mm, 5-inch display): even in cargo
pants it's uncomfortable to carry, so I usually don't carry it, unless
I wear a backpack.

So briefly I was somewhat enthusiastic about acquiring a new phone:
could set LineageOS on it, an XMPP client, some OpenStreetMap
software, a web browser to check Wikipedia, use it as a Wi-Fi access
point in case if my Internet connection will go down, etc; a bunch of
potentially useful applications. And this time I wouldn't go for the
largest available battery, so it could be light and small.

But I've discovered that phones tend to be huge now, even my current
phone is on the smaller side. Out of curiosity, I've compared modern
phones to older ones; their weights and measurements are close to
those from 1995. Later they became smaller and lighter, and then
people started packing hardware comparable to desktop computers into
those. Smartphone prices also match those of desktop computers now.

Another option I was thinking of is to get just a dumbphone. But even
though I live fine without smartphone features at all, unfortunately
it's increasingly assumed that everyone uses them, and access to
services and communities is quite complicated without those. Which is
okay normally, but not in emergencies or other unpleasant
situations -- when everything goes wrong, following Murphy's law.
Hopefully I'm overthinking it and it won't come to reliance on a
smartphone for important and urgent tasks, but that looks like a
possibility.

Unrelated to technical aspects, I've noticed that just like most of
the other unexpected non-Internet interactions, incoming cellphone
calls and messages bring me much more of unpleasant sensations than of
good ones: rarely somebody proposes a walk or something like that, but
more often it's about payment requests (from ads/spam/scam to bills).
That's an issue with abundance of spammers/scammers, and with
accumulating responsibilities, but for me it gets associated with
cellphones -- so it's tempting to imagine being happier without even a
basic cellphone and all the stuff that comes through it, though that'd
be blaming the messenger.

Anyway, all the new 5G cellphones I've spotted in local online stores
are huge. Perhaps I'll wait a bit more, hoping that smaller ones will
appear. As I'm waiting for OpenWRT-supported routers with 802.11ax
support to become available locally. While going for models supporting
just older standards would be easier, yet more wasteful. It's not
great to accumulate tasks for the future either, but dealing with all
sorts of things seems to be a continuous process.


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:Date: 2021-06-20