It’s not just any dumbphone, it’s my dumbphone
A review of the Nokia 2780
I bought the Nokia 2780 impulsively, after failing to make a dumber, older brickphone work. I woke up, opened the New York Times on my iPhone, and read August Lamm’s op-ed on quitting her smartphone. She mentioned she used the Nokia 2780. Good enough, I thought, and bought it.
It’s easy to get stuck at this stage: obsessing over which dumbphone to buy. If that’s where you are, I encourage you to go ahead and order something. Ideally unlocked, so you can use it with your existing carrier. Ideally used, because dumbphones can be surprisingly expensive, new. But something. Otherwise, you can easily spend hours upon hours on your smartphone, researching the perfect dumbphone (I know I did).
Anyways. The Nokia 2780. I am calling it a dumbphone. It is not actually all that dumb. In addition to, you know, phone stuff, the Nokia 2780 can play podcasts, get directions, and connect to your email account. It just does it really badly.
There is no touchscreen; you have to press buttons. Imagine – or remember – pressing the down button exactly 40 times (I counted) to get to the bottom of a news headline. The apps crash randomly. You simply cannot listen to audio and perform another task at the same time.
In other words, the Nokia 2780 provides access to modern technology; it just doesn’t make it easy. Here are some more specific things I have noticed about this little not-exactly-dumb phone.
Better sound
On my iPhone SE, people would often complain of not being able to hear me. I haven’t had that problem on my Nokia. The calls are clear; we hear each other.
Worse text
Texting is another story. To state the obvious, it is difficult to tap out full words on a numeric keypad. I find myself texting like my father – no patience for punctuation, inscrutable abbreviations, a sort of boomer leetspeak.
This is after disabling the phone’s default predictive text, which is so bad as to be unusable. You know how your iPhone swaps out “duck” for “fuck”? Imagine that, but for every word, all the time.
Decent little camera
The Nokia 2780 has a 5-megapixel camera. For context, the newest iPhone has a 68-megapixel camera. As someone who has spent the past decade and change dreading having my picture taken, I love this. The gentle blurring effect of a low-definition camera does wonders for the self esteem.
Random crashes
An app stops working, or the phone randomly turns off, about once a day. That’s a lot.
Durable
As the iPhone 16e commercial keeps reminding me, the average person drops their phone over 200 times a day. There is no reason to believe that’s any different for dumbphone users. When I drop my Nokia (and I do, often), it tends to scatter into pieces. I put it back together and it’s fine.
Janky operating system
The Nokia 2780 doesn’t operate on iOS or Android OS, but KaiOS, an operating system aimed specifically at dumbphones. It is hilariously terrible, but that’s kind of the point. This is not a seamless, pleasurable user experience. There are pop-up ads on the weather app.
Speaking of apps, the KaiOS app store is populated with basic apps of dubious origin. The only one I really trust is the LibriVox app – the good people of LibriVox would never hurt me.
Low battery life
How can a phone that does almost nothing last about the same time as my old-ass, busted-ass iPhone?
No WhatsApp
Last year, Meta pulled KaiOS support for WhatsApp. This was news to me. When I turned on my Nokia for the first time, WhatsApp was one of the first apps I tried to download; it was an unpleasant surprise that it was no longer possible.
WhatsApp is one of the things that keep people from adopting dumbphones (I’m people). WhatsApp was the way I kept in touch with my husband when visiting family, and with my family when living with my husband. Without WhatsApp, I miss out on baby pictures and group-chat-hang-outs and “I love you”s.
Why do so many of us depend on Meta for such basic connection? Now that so many of us do depend on WhatsApp, can we bring ourselves to try something new – or something old – instead?
I changed my status on WhatsApp to “unavailable.” Since then, I’ve got more phone calls, more emails; I’ve also missed out on video chats and photos.
Owning a dumbphone is about missing out on purpose. Is it worth it? I don’t know how to answer that yet.
Thank you for sharing your experiences! I've been trying to prepare myself to transition to a dumb phone and downloaded WhatsApp and Signal to my computer, so I can respond there. It's not as convenient but it at least keeps you connected!
I giggled reading about the durability