Opinion | Here’s what happened when I swapped my iPhone for a dumbphone

Last month while on holiday, I placed an order for a dumbphone made by this company called Punkt Tronics AG, headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland. The Jasper Morrison-designed phone arrived in a neat little black box via DHL a week later.

The MP02, as the model is called, can handle voice calls and SMS text messaging and has a calendar, clock, notes, calculator and not much else. It does support 4G tethering so that one can connect other devices, such as a laptop or iPad, to the phone.

The idea is that if one really needed to check email or post holiday photos on Instagram, one can do so with other devices using the phone’s internet access. But as far as hosting apps on the phone itself is concerned, the MP02 is as dumb as it gets.

There is a small but growing interest in dumb phones, from nostalgic mid-lifers who still remember their Nokia 5110 or Motorola StarTAC flip phones, to those wanting a respite from the bombardment of smartphone notifications and the siren call of social media. For me, I wanted to see if spending less time on my phone would free me up to do something else.

After a week of using the MP02 while on holiday and now back at work, I can say that using a dumbphone has made me realise how much time I previously wasted fiddling around with my phone without purpose, checking Twitter or Facebook out of habit rather than with a specific need to.