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Dispatch — Traveling Without A Smartphone
My quest is at an end (for now)
Rough setback today on my quest to reclaim my life from smartphones.
My $60 CAT S22 flip phone had handled living in Kenya for the past year quite well. As planned, it relegating my iPhone to an at-home, wifi-only device. The flip phone could use apps so I had WhatsApp, Uber, Maps, even M-Pesa, the local mobile payment app. From a lifestyle point of view, anything it couldn’t do could wait until I was in the house. I didn’t have to carry a pocket-size computer everywhere for any possible contingency.
It was going well.
Then I read that the UK company that makes CAT phones, Bullitt, went under a few months ago. Not a good omen. So while the phone itself is quite durable physically (ruggedized for construction workers etc), it was suddenly not a great long-term prospect to embrace.
I’m currently traveling for the next several weeks and was really looking forward to seeing how it would be to travel in the modern age without a smartphone. Put Crandall’s Folly to the stress test. Well, I had the iPhone (8) — and an old iPad, which I’m using to type this in my sister-in-law’s apartment outside Paris — but the plan was to either not carry it around, or only pull it out as needed.
