Sidephone

I recently purchased an MP3 player. It's an utterly obsolete device nowadays since smartphones can do basically anything, but ever since I heard about Sidephone I have become more interested in finding ways to start relying less on my phone. What fascinates me the most about my MP3 player is how small it is. It feels much more convenient to carry around, at the cost of usability. No touchscreen means more fiddling around with the controls, but it is just really good at playing music.

Having a device that serves a singular purpose feels refreshing. I could play my favorite music more quickly with my smartphone, but that comes with the distractions of everything else implied by using the smartphone: unlocking, notifications (which might lead to other apps), then music. With the MP3 player, it's just music.

What I see in the Sidephone is just a phone. The phone is meant to be a device that facilitates communication over long distances. What smartphones have become are pocket computers or multi-purpose devices that can access the internet, play media, etc. along with their original purpose. This has led to the huge touchscreen devices in production nowadays. Smartphones look nothing like the phones from 20 years ago, because they are computers, not phones.

The Sidephone is not a smartphone. It runs Android, yes, but it has no connection to Google. It has pre-installed apps, yes, but it has no app store. It is the light, digital multitool of the pocket, meant to be there when you need it, not to rule your every interaction with the world. It can play music, take calls, receive emails, send text messages, but that's it. It's really all someone might need to communicate with others when they're on the go.

The hardware is what interests me the most about this phone. Its design is antithesis to how smartphones are designed today. The Sidephone has a small touchscreen that takes up about half of its chassis, while the other half is the modular keypad. This keypad can be swapped out for a traditional numpad, a QWERTY keypad, or an MP3 player-like "sundial" pad. With this sundial pad, it starts to look like a slightly larger, perhaps smarter, version of an MP3 player.

The problem with smartphones is that they can do anything a computer can do. Their scope is too large, so their software and hardware have to adapt. For this reason, I don't think that smartphones are meant to serve people any more. The companies that make them have consistently proven that they just want to churn out the same overly expensive models every year to make a profit, all while slowly stripping away our planet's resources and peoples' privacy.

The Sidephone is not one of these large companies. They have less than ten people working on this whole project with a lot to lose. It is in their best interest to make a good product. I think that the people behind Sidephone know their audience and want to make something that caters to them; the people who want a phone that doesn't try to take over their life, a phone that serves them instead of the company that produced it.

This phone is only available for preorder right now, but it comes at an extremely competitive price (relative to smartphones) of $250 ($260 with shipping). There are consistent updates on the company's subreddit, where there is constant transparency about how the production of the phone is progressing. It is compatible with all major carriers except Verizon.

I think this phone is worth the risk, based on everything I have observed about it. I hope it lives up to what I think it wants to be.