In that same box, now called The Box, I found my phone from 13 years ago - a Nokia Asha 210. Not the best phone even when it released.
But I always found it fascinating. The QWERTY keyboard, the form factor, the endless battery, the indestructibility.
I usually pull my Samsung S24 Ultra to either write a note or a to-do. And there is a notification or 10 waiting for me. And 20 minutes later I put it back in my pocket. Maybe I wrote that note, maybe I didn't.
Playing around with the Asha (as it still works like the day it went into The Box) I noticed it does have pretty serviceable Notes and To-Do list apps.
Yes, not as snappy as the S24 Ultra Mega Compute Slab, but does the job quite passably.
So I moved 2 days worth of to-dos and a few notes I reference daily on it and put it in that small pocket jeans have inside the big front pocket. A test drive of sorts.
And it made my to-do and note taking a lot more conscious, purposeful, thoughtful. Like "This is the action we are taking right now, nothing else".
"So there is something to this", I thought to myself.
Not a direct replacement, as there are too many things that won't work. Ever. Banking, 2FA, encrypted chats.
But that gives a clear separation of concerns - S24 is comms, Asha can become an overpowered notebook with some effort.
So to the drawing board I went. What is the use case for a 13-year-old, albeit neat, "phone"?
When done I was left with a couple of things - notes, to-do, some small old game (from before the gacha and ads) to kill some time, maybe a book, maybe some music.
But for this experiment in taking back some control of my time and attention, changes were in order on the big phone as well.
Which led me to think about why we overuse our phones.
What I got to is the deliberate removal of end-states - social feeds don't really have an end, TikToks keep coming and coming. Not really in our control. The "algorithm" decides what we see, what we consume. The consumption itself is not the issue, the lack of deliberation of what to consume is.
So I decided to remove socials (except LinkedIn, cause work) from my phone. And put limits on what is left. LinkedIn gets 15 minutes daily, Claude - 20.
But this left an interesting gap - what do I do on my smoke breaks.
Enter the Asha.
We already have the notes and to-do covered. There are a lot of archives with games for it. Some of them pretty good for what they are.
But the e-books are another topic. No epub reader for S40.
But that's an old, well-documented, frozen software stack. So I went back to my French friend. Can we build an e-book reader for a 13-year-old phone? Yes. Yes, we can.
Here it is in action (and I will drop the GH links for everything at the end.)
That needed some doing but it works. As did the few other apps I created for this - password-protected notes, a weekly schedule for my son's school, an audio book player and a really specific news app.
That last one is pretty interesting because it plays on the bound of my "this is an offline, terminal device". The idea is that I still want to read some news about things I care about (specifically NOT politics). But, as per my earlier musings, this needed an end, a limit. So 10 articles pulled daily on The Batcomputer. And while I drink my morning coffee, turn on WI-FI on the Asha (yes, it does have WI-FI), sync today's articles and turn off the radio. That's it. 10 articles for the day.
And here we are 2 weeks later. I didn't become a luddite. But I do use my phone less and more deliberately. The Asha is still in the coin pocket and used daily. And all the notes land there.
All of them.
The S24 comes out for chats, e-mail and to check something on the internet. And for my guilty pleasure - Warhammer 40k Tacticus.
All the Asha apps are open-source and can be found on my GitHub if someone feels so inclined.