Letter from the Editor: In Defence of the Dumbphone

Congratulations! You are reading the very first edition of the Iron Warrior, the Engineering Society newspaper at the University of Waterloo, the culmination of several hundred persons’ hours of work.

I am Nancy, and I was more excited to take the helm of the Iron Warrior as the Editor-in-Chief than I am to graduate – which is pretty dang exciting. Being the latest in a long line of Editors, one has a rich legacy to live up to. So far I have endeavoured not to screw up too badly.

Some things that I have learned already:

• File organization is important. Establish a strict hierarchy and stick to it

• Gmail has this feature where you can have nested tags. Use it. Love it.

• Don’t be afraid – sometimes things happen, but sometimes they spontaneously resolve themselves. Sometimes, it’s not as complicated as you think it is. Sometimes nobody notices and you can cover it up with a massive picture.

• Always, there is probably somebody out there willing to help.

And dang, there are a lot of people willing to help.

Thank you to Alex Toth for helping secure advertising this term.

Thank you to Nachiket, Bryan, and Elizabeth for coming in to copy edit and making the office seem less empty and creepy. Thanks to Nina and Leah for answering my InDesign noob questions. Thanks to Jessica and off-stream editor Cam for copy editing as well.

Thank you to Emmanuel for fixing some ads, the EngSoc candidate pictures, and learning to layout!

Thanks to Andrew Davidson, the elections commissioner for B-Soc, for delivering the candidate profiles and blurbs on time! Speaking of elections, VOTE online on Saturday, January 31st to Wednesday, February 4th! Even if there’s only one candidate, you still need to vote YES or NO to accept them!

Thanks to Ashlyn for the prof interview – we might make it a regular thing! If you have a prof who you’d you like to see featured in the Iron Warrior, shoot an email to iwarrior@uwaterloo.ca.

And thanks to everybody else for writing, coming to meetings, and drawing comics.

We do have a lot of columns right now – Alex Toth’s music column is back, as is Nina Feng’s Leafy Thoughts, which concerns environmental issues. The Benchwarmer Report is back in jubilant form. On the Shoulder of Giants is returning from the A-Society and will be profiling inventors throughout history! Last but not least, Nachiket’s column on startups is also returning from the A-Society and might prove to be an inspiration for all of you with entrepreneurial aspirations or a burning need for a 4th year design project idea!

Anyways, if you want to write for the Iron Warrior, it’s not too late to start! We take submissions for all types of content – humour, news, science, campus life, comics… the possibilities are infinite.

So, moving on to the title of this editorial… what’s that about dumbphones?

Dumbphones are any phone that is not a smartphone. They are usually known as feature phones.

Oxymoronically, feature phones are a class of low-end mobile phone characterized by having far fewer capabilities than a modern smartphone. They tend to have a 7+ day battery life, high durability, small size, and no touchscreens. You may recall them as the flipphones used by Walter White on Breaking Bad, or the titular device of the CollegeHumor short “She’s Such a Butterphone”. Feature phones have been in decline after Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, particularly among the business and student markets, although they are still very common in the developing world, where electrical access may be limited and major longevity between charges is a selling point. Feature phones are referred to as “dumb phones”.

I can’t deny that smartphones have advantages over feature phones. There are useful apps available that smartphones can run, including Google Maps, Tinder/Grindr, Instagram, and Angry Birds: Star Wars. Speaking of Instagram, the hardware of smartphone cameras are actually pretty good for general-purpose consumer photography. And yeah, when travelling with someone who does have a smartphone, I sometimes ask them to check the traffic on a route, the best path to the restaurant, or the showtimes at a movie. Meanwhile, one can conduct business on smartphones and send emails to professional contacts or members of your Fourth Year Design Project group. You could get a lot of stuff done on a smartphone.

Yeah, ha ha. I literally sit at a desk in front of a screen for 6-12 hours a day, and using a small screen would worsen my eyesight even more.

And when travelling? There’s nothing in a smartphone that I actually miss. I don’t actually enjoy digitally documenting my diet, life, and friends in graphical formats – not to mention the risk of being featured on the “Asians Taking Pictures of Food” tumblr. I can plan my routes in advance instead of putting Google Maps on the spot. I can memorize addresses and intersections – or, you know, write it down. It’s incrementally more difficult than having it available on-the-fly, but I trust the battery life of a Post-it more than a 2-year-old Galaxy.

And you know how much my monthly plan is? Trick question. Haven’t actually got a monthly plan. I use roughly $70 worth of air minutes and texts per year. If I really wanted to, I’d get the $15/month plan for unlimited texts, since nobody really calls anymore. But as it is, compared to, oh, the $35 unlimited data/text/air plan from Wind, I’m still ahead $350/year. It’s not worth the $1/day for me to be able to browse reddit on the bus and play Candy Crush on the subway.

I’ve dropped my phone multiple times but popped the pieces back into place right after.

My phone is four and a half years old, but still lasts a week per charge.

If ever I was to become a drug dealer, then I would use a pay-as-you-go feature phone with a massive battery life so that the po-po couldn’t track me down while I was negotiating with buyers who couldn’t tell their feet from a pair of ferrets.

My feature phone doesn’t need time to load a keypad. The load time is nonexistent. There is no lag. I could call 911 in the time it takes for an iPhone to unlock itself.

My feature phone actually fits into the pocket of my jeans.

You may guess at this point that my passion for the dumbphone extends beyond the material benefits.

It’s not just that I appreciate the minimalistic design and functions of a dumbphone, but also all the things it lacks. Internet connectivity, games, apps, Tinder – they’re nice to have, but I don’t need them, and more importantly, I don’t ever want to feel like I need them.

Smartphones are addictively good fun. Having any type of device dependency is a weakness.

Sure, some of you can tear your eyes away from the smartphone from time to time, but so few of you! Statistically speaking, I don’t trust myself to not become one with the smartphone. I’m practically one with the laptop already.

Those idle minutes walking outside, in the food court, or in the subway are valuable in gathering one’s thoughts away from the pressing concerns of work or school or the Iron Warrior. They are also important in ensuring that one doesn’t, oh, get hit by a car, get pickpocketed, or miss the stop entirely.

Cheesy as it is, it’s important to live in the moment, and there’s more to the moment than documenting it for your mom and your internet stalkers, and forgetting about it straight after a game of Plants vs. Zombies.

You made it to the end of this article. Still got a smartphone? Still feel you’re the master of your own attention span? Still think you won’t instinctively reach for the phone in the middle of a $40/hour lecture?

Then congratulations! We will call for you when Skynet becomes self-aware and humanity needs you to put down some genocidal robots.

For now, please enjoy your smartphone responsibly!

See you next issue —

Nancy Hui