Every time I see these "back to the basics" phone articles, I think camera.
Having an adequate camera built into the phone I take everywhere has been a game changer. Before that it was always a decision, do I take the camera or not? Often take it for nothing, and sometimes a killer photo op and you don't have it.
So a hybrid of traditional featurephone and traditional pocket camera. No temptation to immediately share on social media. Just to download later for your collection.
My phone is a bunch of tools, for me. It'd be hard to replace with a dumb phone, now that I'm so used to it.
- Flashlight (yeah, dumb phone could probably do this one, at least, if it has any camera at all, so a flash)
- Level (!)
- In a pinch, a tape measure (I don't trust it for anything precise, but it's fine for rough measurements)
- Tuner (as in, for musical instruments)
- Camera (video and still)
- Internet messenger (I barely use SMS, haven't for years, and despite being a relatively late adopter of the new wave of messengers like WhatsApp)
- Access point for my laptop when working but not in my (home) office.
- OTP 2FA thingy
- GPS/mapping device
- Music player that integrates wirelessly with my car stereo (that is, I can control it with my car stereo controls)
- TV remote for when my kids manage to lose all the physical remotes, which is often.
Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting right now.
I could lose the web browser relatively painlessly. And I don't do social shit on it (private messaging aside—no FB, Twitter, Insta, TikTok, none of that) so that doesn't matter. I don't game on it. Still, I'd need several other things to replace it.
More than half the time on my Nokia phone with "Android One" that opens with the camera itself is disabled, so the app opens but I don't see the camera image, just black.
Are you using an old Android phone? I recall having this problem on my Nexus 5 (one if the many reasons I gave up on Android) Latest iPhones are lightning fast and the app is on the lock screen so you don't even have to unlock the phone.
But in natural iOS fashion, anytime I need to rapidly take a photo I find the phone registering my horizontal swipes on the lock screen to open camera as vertical ones for a good 5 seconds and I miss the shot.
Yeah its a home button model. Really its just a fault of having to rely on touch screen inputs which become naturally less accurate the more hasty you are. Maybe my quick swipes aren't firm enough, or my hands might be too hot or sweaty, or too cold to register input, etc. I wish there was some way to map a physical button assignment to the camera short of having to jailbreak the phone.
On the topic of the camera, I've been considering buying a disposable camera to keep on me for those "gotta have it" moments. For one, even my iPhone 12 takes a few seconds before the camera is ready, but more importantly, I have kids, and if I take a picture of them doing something, the moment immediately ends, because they want to see it. They know they can see it now, so they stop whatever their doing to come look. I always tell them they don't need to see it because they're living it, and the picture is for later, but they always ask anyway.
We got a polaroid camera. They definitely wanna see it after, but hey, so do adults. The best addition is we got this little like rolodex type polaroid-photo container that my kid uses as a bedside photogallery of their favourite people.
I understand the appeal, but dumbphones aren't as good as they used to be. These days the typical dumbphone has some version of Android or a web-based OS like KaiOS shoehorned onto a poorly spec'd device with no touch screen.
Dumbphones used to have real time operating systems that were built with the limitations of the device in mind. Many of them were quite snappy and responsive.
This was a problem, but in the last year or two there are some good ones again. Check out the Sunbeam F1, which is actually reasonably snappy.
I have used a dumbphone all along and agree that they were really bad for awhile. The Alcatel Go Flip 2 was a Kai OS device that was one of the worst pieces of a electronics I ever used, and I was stuck on it for 4 years because there were no alternatives on 4G. But now the phones are alright again.
The article highlights the Light Phone, but my impression is its battery life is so bad I wouldn't want it. But it's also custom software on a custom device and has some potential.
I plan on getting my kids some kind of flip phone or dumb phone when they turn 10. Will try to hold off on smart phones until 8th grade.
The biggest problem right now has been the lack of a good mp3 player for the kids. Years ago we had the iPod. It was a perfect device. But Apple has discontinued that in favor of things that are basically iPhones.
There are a bunch of cheap Chinese-made mp3 players on Amazon, but they tend to have terrible navigation, sorting songs alphabetically, making it impossible to create playlists, inability to sort by genre, etc etc. I haven't found a good one (recommendations happily accepted).
So I gave the kids my old Android phone without a Sim card, and removed most of the apps, but of course they'll use the camera, and the browser... and I realized that this was just a slippery slope to that full-featured smart phone that I didn't want to get them yet.
If you like the older iPods you could always get one and upgrade it. I've been thinking of doing something along those lines after seeing a recent HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345399
Also, dissing Chinese-made MP3 players seems a bit weird as I'm pretty sure all iPods were made in China.
Fair point, but I was using it as a short-hand for saying "cheaply-made Chinese junk" -- the kind of fly-by-night companies that anyone who has tried to buy stuff on Amazon in the past few years is now familiar with.
Of course quality stuff is also made in China, and I was not referring to that.
I saw that post too and immediately ordered the iFlash Solo adapter. Coincidentally I had just run across an iPod video in a drawer that wouldn't boot up... it was about a 20 minute project to replace the hard disk with the adapter and a big SD card, and the iPod is working great now!
I've had a good experience with SanDisk clip MP3 players. Still have 2 of them, although I don't use them anymore. You can still buy various models (new) on Amazon.
NW-A105 A Series Walkman® Digital Music Player $349.99
NW-ZX507 ZX Series Walkman® Digital Music Player $829.99
NW-WM1A Signature Series Walkman® Digital Music Player $1,199.99
NW-WM1Z Signature Series Walkman® Digital Music Player $3,199.99
WOW
Of course there is a "decent" priced one:
NW-E394 Walkman® Digital Music Player $74.99
But even that is outrageous, considering the similar players costed ~$10 ten years ago and there is only a 8Gb storage on it.
I don't know anyone still using MP3s. Everyone has moved on to one streaming service or another.
As a parent, I don't feel like purchasing offline music for my kids as it's one more thing they'll outgrow as they get older. I don't see a need to shelve a thumb drive full of Paw Patrol or whatever next to their outgrown jackets and rain boots.
An Android - old or new - with a custom distribution can be tailored into whatever type of device you want it to be. My daughter has one which works as a phone and can run applications which I have approved (which I can do from my own devices or on hers) with freely selectable time limits. Another device is in use as a remotely-controllable media player running mpd. Yet another one is used as a trailer camera, it creates its own wifi network to which devices which have the correct credentials can connect, using the camera to show video and 2-way audio. I do not have a SIM card in these last two devices but especially the trailer cam could double as a GPS locator seeing as how it takes power from the trailer hookup, using the phone battery as backup. Since it does not need a screen - and since that screen also happened to be broken - I removed it from the device, saving power and prolonging the battery lifetime. The ubiquity of low-price new and older Android devices makes these ideal for this type of alternate use given that they come with ample memory, processing power, a built-in battery and charger circuit, network connectivity, motion sensors, camera and microphone, a compass, gyroscope and more - often to be had for free or a few €.
I think it's increasingly hard to live without a phone or without a smartphone.
Many businesses seem to be eschewing web access in favour of using an app. The restaurant I went to yesterday had it's menu only available by QR code. You cannot book an Uber. You cannot date on Tinder. You cannot buy food on too good to go. You cannot even find some podcasts because they stopped running an RSS feed.
But maybe this is just the march of technology. I had no complaints when things started moving to the web, but I guess that's because I liked the web. I suppose that's just me being hypocritical.
I'm moving in to a new apartment tomorrow and it comes with this "app" to communicate with your neighbours. Of course, it's just an app and not a site. I installed it on Android emulator just to see what it's like; the entire thing is basically just a web forum, like what we had 20 years ago, except of course it's worse. You can't search (on a page with ^F, or in general), you can't adjust its tiny font size, it only runs on iOS/Android, etc.
I must sound like an old man, but I don't see it as anything other than reinventing 20-year old tech except "as an app" and shittier.
I think it's very different from the move to the web; in spite of common complaints about it on HN, it really brought cross-platform capabilities to the world. Yes, there's issues with Chrome's dominance, but have you tried running on Linux or NetBSD in 2000? It was all fun and games until someone sent you a .doc file, or until you had to do your taxes, or until you wanted to do a million other things that were "Windows-only".
With the web the only thing stopping anyone from creating a new environment that works for a lot of common every-day things is just putting in the work to implement an OS + browser. Yes, this is not easy, but also not undoable (and not as hard as sometimes claimed, IMO), and compared to proprietary protocols and formats of the 90s it's a huge improvement.
But with all this mobile stuff now we're back to proprietary protocols and formats that only work on proprietary systems. I don't think it's comparable at all. If anything, it's the reverse, and also worse than the 90s because PCs are "open" platforms where you can install any OS you want, which is not the case with the vast majority of mobile phones, and the "app store" distribution model makes it even worse.
I'm not necessarily against smartphones as a concept, but the current implementations are a huge regression in many ways.
>Many businesses seem to be eschewing web access in favour of using an app.
I suspect that a basic but very interesting to them reason for this is simply that they want to mine the shit out of your personal information to any extent possible. It's shitty, dishonest, intrusive but very real. I sometimes use paypal and though it works just fine on a desktop or laptop, or a browser inside my phone, the scummy company itself basically forces the option of downloading the app on you at every single goddam turn, with every non-app login and any time you transfer funds. How badly they'd like to have that sweet phone permissions access.
I don't mean to pick on you but this is a common platitude and
fallacy:
> I think it's increasingly hard to live without a phone or without a
smartphone.
Maybe for you, for the set of choices you have made in life. When I
see this sentiment I smile a little because I have a Nokia dumb phone
that I use only a few times per week. The less I use my phone the
easier life becomes, quite literally.
To address the examples you give; In my town there are amazing
restaurants all along the beach where we pay cash, know the waiters by
name, you can still go out safely and date people you meet, and we
have record shops that sell vinyl and CDs. Sometimes I like to go for
days without a mobile phone at all. (And in case you're wondering, my
life is filled with many heavy responsibilities that I manage in other
ways)
With the greatest respect, I see a fair few HN comments that speak to
parochial lifestyles, with sweeping statements like:
Everybody does this
Nobody does that now
What people want is this
<thing> is inevitable
<other thing> is ubiquitous now
Sweeping statements generalised from limited personal experience and
quite narrow horizons make me think "That's will make these people
consumers not innovators. They accept what they are given".
> But maybe this is just the march of technology.
It's not the "march" Armies and ants march. It's the "flowering" or
diversification of technology. Some people are using technology in
different ways than others. Which is what we'd hope for and expect
from a liberal democracy, right? If we wanted everybody to do the
same, think the same, and buy the same, we'd vote for communism
surely?
Or are some digital technologies ushering in a form of communism on
the sly?
No, I don't think youre picking on me at all. It's definitely possible to go without those things. No one needs to use Uber or Tinder.
But I guess it feels like you're just not interested or need those. Going without rideshare is definitely possible, but it's another option one is giving up by foregoing a phone.
It could be age and lifestyle differences - I'm a 50+ father, big town
(small city) from England, I have an image of you in mind as a
somewhat younger city dweller Gunax.
But regardless such differences, I've a theory that what social media
has done online, causing polarisation or rather partition into silos,
smartphones (and the app service culture of some businesses) are doing to
us in reality.
After making a conscious effort to rid myself of smartphones (or
rather not get sucked into dependency) 10 years ago, the rest fell into
place. What I mean is, cause and effect wise, to some extent things
like my choice of restaurants to the company I keep, and working
habits, might just be determined by my horizons as a non-user.
Similarly perhaps for you, the world you see is determined by the lens
(a 6 inch square) you look through, and the more you stay there the
more it feels like "life would be harder without a phone".
Factoring out any value judgements, in this way technology is
polarising society.
I know a lot of people who would love some sort of middle option. They are never on their phone - they only use it for texting or navigation.
I think people often forget this segment was briefly explored before being killed by the carriers. The Microsoft Kin was supposed to launch with a cheaper, data-light Verizon plan. But Verizon at the last minute decided they didn't want to undercut their data plans and the phone required the same $70 a month data plan as any other smartphone.
Obviously, consumer demand for phones that do everything was heavily affected by the iPhone. But I would argue Blackberry and Palm (RIP!) would have ultimately faired a bit better if their data-sipping designs weren't treated so hostile by carriers.
Verizon has Visible, which offers unlimited talk/text/data for $25/mo. I helped someone setup their basic $100 phone, which is free if you are switching carriers. It's all someone in the middle option you talk about would need.
I never left too. Still using my Nokia E72 business phone. I send and receive lots of text messages for my work, replying using full qwerty keyboard is a breeze.
Plus one function i cant live without - "say caller name" when phone is ringing.
You know whos calling you without looking at the device.
Device is about 15 years old, made in Finland, I have couple of spare ones in my drawer, swapping parts around normally brings it back to life when any problems (once a display went, once the keyboard, 20 minutes fix on the bench with no special tools needed).
I had the "say caller name" in Android 2.3.7 CyanogenMod 7, and I don't know why this wasn't widespread until a year or two ago. For me is really useful when I'm using it over Bluetooth.
Does anyone know a good dumbphone that supports 4G/5G in the US and would work on Verizon? I know an older person who was recently forced to get an iPhone by the lack of dumbphones, and hates it.
I've used a Nokia 6030 since 2008 or so. It works perfectly as a phone or for texting. The battery, still, lasts an entire week. It is tiny and I barely notice it in my pocket. Phones are good phones. Trying to mix computing with a cell baseband modem you can never have control of for legal reasons is just asking for trouble. Even the simplest laptop far exceeds the computing ability of a phone when it comes to actually doing work. I also use a discrete car GPS for navigation, a discrete camera for photos, etc.
For those who might be interested in exploring dumb/ feature phones, there are a few out there that offer some kind of Signal/ Whatsapp compatibility. I just made the move. There's a site, Dumbphone Finder [1], that has a number of modern dumbphones organized into categories with different levels of functionality, expense etc. Overall I've been very happy with the move and I haven't lost much in my life. I can do almost everything on the computer and whatever does require a mobile device I run on an emulator. For music, I've moved everything over to an MP3 player [2] that's fairly decent, definitely not iPod quality, but it's not too cheaply made. I threw a 256GB SD card in there and moved almost all my music over. It's way nicer to go for a walk with some music knowing your phone isn't going to start buzzing (or feeling like you have to check because it isn't buzzing!). This is the best system for me.
I feel like I may be an outlier here, but I loved the walkie-talkie feature on Nextel. I wish this was a standard feature on phones and across providers.
Another angle on this: major semiconductor fabs in Asian DO NOT ALLOW smart phones for espionage/IP reasons. So most vendor sales people have only dumb phones because they can bring them inside and take calls on visits. Smart phones have to be left at the guard shack in the parking lot. This is also true for many non-semiconductor manufacturing industries.
Bringing in computers??? Forget about it. I would bring in my computer sometimes but only with special 3rd level manager dispensation and I had to have all the ports taped up with security tape, have all "radios" (WiFi/BT) turned off (under threat of vendor "permaban" - imagine explaining to your boss you got the entire company banned), only being allowed CDRs going in for S/W update (no flash drives) and only taking out written paper notes for debugging back to support or R&D via your phone back in the parking lot. Essentially something worse than returning to the pre-internet 1970s or 1980s but with all the product complexity of today.
Dumb phones have been a thing for a long while because of this.
Personally I do not like much being back to a dumbphone but I do like less to pay for a smartphone and it's connectivity for someone else profit in exchange of crumbs.
I've tried the PinePhone, witch is fantastic but not much ready to be a daily driver, so for now I keep my old Nokia (that suffer casual glitches) until GMS network shutdown will impose a 4G phone, hoping that at that time the PinePhone or something else will be ready enough.
While I recognize tha Google Maps navigate very well, far better than classic PND devices like my not-so-old but not-that-new TomTom I still being able to travel with the TT... I do not take much photos so a classic cheap wifi-less digital camera (12Mp) with a classic flash memory card accessible via an USB adapter or directly through the camera USB cable on my desktop it's again enough, no good as a phone in my pocket, take more place etc but still enough to have in car. A classic outdoor GPS for trekking it's somewhat better than a smartphone since it's far less prone to fall and breaks while it's UI and cartography are definitively not much etc. It's doable. Uncomfortable but doable.
What I fear it the future: I fear that not enough people react so in a soon future we are forced to use some Android or iOS app do do mandatory things like payments, IDs, even just banking third factor auth etc because that's the trend I see everywhere. I fear future cars with mandatory connections and an unknown set of built-in vulnerabilities I can't check nor mitigate much. I fear for my next washing machine if there will be no one on the market without a mandatory connection and automated fw updates... In general I know that if a device is called "smart" that means it's user is considered "dumb" and I do not like that, simply. So I hope enough people will force OEMs to keep some alternatives around.
Back in the day you could get a dumb phone with 2 week battery life and a screen viewable in any light from total darkness to direct sunlight. That combination of features seems to be a lost technology. A lot of places have or are in the process of shutting down 2G so you can't just keep using an old phone even if you can somehow find a good battery for it.
I also observed that my own smartphone usage is unhealthy - constantly checking it when I am taking a walk, or when I go into a park to lay in the sun, or read a book etc. I never could go long without checking my phone, engaging in Whatsapp or looking up something on the web. Even so when on an activity I specifically picked to be offline/away from my computer.
My solution was also getting a dumb Nokia phone as a "leisure phone", which has no WiFi/BT but a headphone jack and music capability (it has an ancient Opera browser that I never use). Luckily my phone provider offers a "dual sim" service where I get a second SIM card with the same number, so in case someone calls me, both my iPhone and my dumb phone ring simultaneously. I only programmed a number of ~10 close friends and family into the phonebook, and now when I leave the house when I want to have some quiet time, I only take the dumb phone. I have the security of being able to call for help in case of emergencies, and am reachable for friends and family in matters of true emergencies (calls, not Whatsapps). Battery lasts 3 weeks in standby, but since I mostly have it turned off and turn it only on when I take it, it becomes mostly irrelevant.
Unfortunately the dumb phone selection isn't perfect; I'd really like to have a better camera because I do want to take snapshots now and then (without the urge to immediately upload it to social media) and the music player is very limited in functionality.
As for the experience, I can highly recommend this. Ever since I got it and got into occasional "offline mode", I realize how much BS time I spent on the smartphone. Having those "off" times are relaxing and bring a certain peace of mind. And funily when I am out without the smartphone, you realize how much other people are constantly staring into their phones in locations they actively went to refuel (parks, lakes, beaches, at the movies etc.).
I really wish I could go back to using a dumbphone as my daily driver. Most of the things I use my phone for are basically the same as they were 15 years ago, but the implementations has changed (Spotify for music, Signal for texts) and I doubt they'll ever bother to target dumbphones.
Im thinking how navigation can work on feature phone.
Possible solution and an idea for project :
you connect Alexa / Cortana / Siri / voice chatbot to phone number and then you just call whenever need internet from feature phone a.k.a. "dumbphone"
I've failed, so instead I've tried to make smartphones do less (I have a Moto G8 and iPhone SE2 but in both cases install as little as possible and definitely no socials or similar).
The reason I failed to avoid smartphones is that dumbphones don't do enough - they are missing a password manager and a 2FA app.
On smartphones I use BitWarden and Authy, but I'd consider any non-Android non-Apple non-Microsoft phone that had similar functionality. Until I can get into my online accounts with the help of my phone, that phone is incomplete, even though I want nothing else except 4G (for network compatibility), calls, SMS, and a local music player.
I run oathtool on my laptop as "2FA". Arguably not "true" 2FA, but with strong non-reused passwords it's "good enough". There's a bunch of non-Android phones like the PinePhone and whatnot, which should be perfectly fine for what you want.
I recently got a Pocketbook HD, which is a small Linux-based eReader. You can run your own "apps" on it with a minimal amount of hackery (I use KOReader[1] for example). I've been thinking of trying to get some passport manager/2FA running on it as well.
It's got WiFi as well (which I never use), and bluetooth for music (which is pretty useful when reading in noisy trains etc.) Actually it would be pretty neat if it could do calls and SMS: it's larger than a phone, but I don't need to always carry a phone, and I usually carry my eReader if I'm away from the house for various things (e.g. when I went to IKEA today I carried it with me to have something to read during lunch).
I think the best middle ground would be a full touch screen phone with camera loaded with an OS that restrict all the apps and no browsing but allows basic features like calling, texting,clicking pictures, playing music, and using maps.
I have never seen the appeal of this "smartphone" fad and have had a dumbphone all along. I think the article misses another reason for recent resurgence, which is that the most recent generation of dumbphones are actually usable. There was a dark period from about 2012-2020 where the phones were simply terrible: bad hardware, bad software etc. My phone from 2005 was better than anything available during that period. (The problem was that the old great models couldn't be adapted to 4G networks, and nobody wanted to write new software for dumbphones.)
Now there are some nice ones available again. I like the Sunbeam F1.
There’s been a steady decrease in my smartphone use from 2016 till today. In the past I used my phone 6+ hours a day. Yesterday I used it to check email once for 3 minutes, I opened safari three times for an average of less than 60 seconds in each use, and used 2FA 5 times. It was a slightly higher than average smartphone use day.
As a person that is mostly indifferent about my iPhone I don’t understand who would buy a dumb phone. Is it for the price sensitive? Is it for people that don’t know how to use a smartphone? Is it for security sensitive? Is it for people with cellphone addicted?
Would be nice to be able to receive messages over Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram etc. However that does not seem to be possible with any 'dumbphone' yet. I just don't use SMS messaging anymore.
When someone finally makes a "dumbphone" that accepts Signal and Whatsapp messages as text, has Maps, and has a nice camera, that will be a game changer.
But of course my list for what it needs is different from someone else's, and at that point we'll have a smart phone.
For messages, except for proprietary platform that lock out such option, around the world it's not hard to setup a gateway at home to send&receive chats and mirror them (with relevant limitations about length, images etc) via SMS.
For chart, while not on par with Google Maps classic PND devices are still on-sale, I use a classic TomTom on my car and so far while less comfortable have always bring me where I want.
That's to say: so far it's doable, and adapt personal habits to personal choices without being an eremite it's again possible, just not as much comfortable, it's a classic trade-off.
Too dumb though. Can I just get a phone that calls, texts, plays music, a good camera, and has navigation. Maybe even a web browser. But absolutely no App Store, games, or social media.
Except that many Android phones come with a bunch of apps you can't remove, including things like Facebook and whatnot. Probably differs per brand, but when I test-drove a Motorola last month there were a whole bunch of apps like that.
I guess you could just ignore it, but these kind of unremovable apps just makes me unreasonably angry: it's my goddamn fucking phone and I – and only I – gets to decide which fucking apps are on it!
I would add, a stock smartphone with LineageOS or some other de-Googled ROM. A stock smartphone is still going to have Google Play Services, Firebase, and a bunch of other things that could phone home.
It never left. Nokia FTW, I really would not have been able to be as productive as I've been in the last couple of years if I had had a smartphone to distract me.
I'd buy a phone that did email and slack (unfortunately) with no camera or anything else beyond making calls and sending SMS. I don't need MMS or RCS either. Plain boring text would be sufficient.
I absolutely love dumbphones and stopped use smartphones since they began to require SIM to be cut, possibly for partly imcompatibility with dumbphones.
Short answer: buy the cheapest phone you can find, especially if you can buy it from hands to hands without a post. Second rule is: the dumber the phone the simpler to grok its settings and the less likely it will bother you in unexpected situations.
Longer answer depends of what features you need: j2me (for reading HN if needed), qwerty keyboard (for writing long comments on same resource), jack 3.5mm (for radio/mp3/lossless depends of smartness), quality of camera if any, longevity of body, maybe something unique like that feeling from opening/closing a 8800. Somebody cares about GSM-900 which works best in deep woods. Today before buying smartphone we are reading about how much RAM and pixels it has and that's all. But 15-20 years ago choosing a phone was really interesting process.
Consider having several chargers especially if you are going to use something not common and not famous by longevity like thin Nokia's port. Maybe you want to solder USB-A instead of a socket with an integrated power supply to your proprietary charger socket (if 5V) to let your dumbphone be charged from powerbanks, for my Nokias with thin charger it works perfect. Avoid sh~ like Sony Ericson's FastPort (which is required for charging) and rare memory like MMC and prefer MicroUSB for charging and MicroSD for storage. For example, I love listening podcasts so my memory cards doesn't live for a long time if every week I need to refill all the memory with new files - but MicroSD costs next to nothing. Consider having extra batteries or maybe several phones having similar battery, especially if you love hiking. For example, some old Samsungs can use battery from smaller Samsungs (with spacer made from anything) and Nokia's BL-5C is one of the most popular batteries ever.
Nokia 1280 has jack 3.5 for a radio, a lighter (poor but better than nothing), its body is not much weaker from 3310 but replaceble without a screwdriver with several colors from grey to purple. Battery is not BL-5C but its SIM slot works decent even with cut simcards. So let this dumbphone be my go-to answer.
Having an adequate camera built into the phone I take everywhere has been a game changer. Before that it was always a decision, do I take the camera or not? Often take it for nothing, and sometimes a killer photo op and you don't have it.
So a hybrid of traditional featurephone and traditional pocket camera. No temptation to immediately share on social media. Just to download later for your collection.