Gadgets to get you off your phone

When is a phone not a phone? When it’s a camera, a music player, a map, a bank, a dating service, a messaging platform, a games console and a portal to the overwhelming totality of the internet. What was once a device for making calls is now all things to all people. This is, obviously, incredibly convenient. You can use the same slender device to pay in a restaurant, take public transport, chat with friends, or shoot, edit and distribute an entire film. Handy.

But there are downsides to centralising all of life in one device. We have become dependent on a tool that has been precision-engineered to distract us. Our attention is constantly divided. News notifications about the latest global disaster pop up while I’m chatting on a dating app. An email tells me my job application has been unsuccessful while I’m creating a playlist for my birthday party. Maybe I don’t want all of these things in one place. I don’t want my bank to tell me that I’ve gone into my overdraft on my camera. I don’t want my ex to be able to text me on my alarm clock.

TikTok is awash these days with Gen Zers attempting to solve the issue by getting into retro technology. They’re using “dumbphones” that can’t go on social media; by “friction-maxxing”, they’re rejecting the ultra-convenience of modern life and deciding there’s value in doing things the hard way. They’re listening to music on iPods with wired headphones, taking pictures with old digital cameras and fetishising the tactile pleasures of the Walkman.

In the single-purpose device, which does just one thing and nothing more, they see an appeal. A piece of technology designed with a respect for boundaries. Some reminisce longingly about the age when each home had a computer room where you had to physically go and sit at a desk to use the web. What they’re actually aching for, I think, is a time when we had control over the technology in our lives, rather than allowing it to run roughshod over us.

I’m just about old enough to remember iPods the first time around and don’t have much interest in revisiting that time. I’m still haunted by the hours wasted untangling headphone cables and struggling to sync my MP3 library to my desktop. But the idea of returning to single-purpose devices intrigues me. It could displace the smartphone from its centrality in my life, and give me some breathing space away from the carnival of distraction that is the internet.

Might there be, I wondered, a solution that doesn’t involve nostalgia? Are there modern products employing contemporary design sensibilities and cutting-edge technology that could replace functions that my phone performs in daily life?

I drew up a list of things I do with my phone that could reasonably be outsourced to another device. Alarms to wake up in the morning. Taking photographs. Reading. Listening to music. Making notes. Recording audio for interviews. Then I sought out modern products that try to perform these functions in a more thoughtful way. For one month, I lived with these devices, replacing my phone as much as possible. Could they provide benefits that rivalled the sheer convenience of the smartphone? Could they justify adding more technological clutter to my life?

The first promise that many single-purpose devices make is that they will liberate you from the vortex of the smartphone. When I go to turn off my alarm in the morning, the next thing I know I’m scrolling through Instagram reels, replying to messages, skim-reading the news. Take the phone out of the equation, and you remove the opportunity for distraction. And maybe actually get up out of bed.

A study last year found that just two weeks without mobile internet on participants’ phones improved their attention and wellbeing. I might not be able to live totally without mobile internet, but I can decide to wake up without it. Copenhagen-based company Habity has made an alarm clock designed to help keep your phone out of the bedroom. It’s a sweet device, pleasingly retro in aesthetic, with a moulded plastic body that looks like a face pleasantly inclined towards you on a stout neck — though I chose to disable the somewhat smug cartoon face that occupies the screen when inactive.

There are two large buttons on top and a wheel at the side to adjust settings. The screen is made of the same e-paper technology used in e-readers like the Kindle. It is intended to be easy on the eyes — far more pleasant than waking up in the middle of the night to be blasted by the megawatt glare of an iPhone screen.

The controls can be a little fiddly, but once it’s set up it works smoothly. The first few days I simply woke up, grabbed my phone that was charging on the other side of the room and went back to bed. But over time I trained myself to resist this urge and wake to the gentle birdsong I’d selected before beginning my day in just my own company, without letting the world of messages, news and emails assault my eyeballs first thing. As someone who likes to listen to podcasts to sleep, I also identified a more high-tech alarm clock, called the Dreamie, with a full-colour screen and advanced features including podcasts, with plans to provide sleep tracking. Thoughtfully designed with intuitive touch controls, it offered more functionality while still serving the purpose of banishing the phone from the bedroom. The Dreamie is only available in the US, but there are plans to release it in the UK.

Another device offering to eliminate distractions from your life is the reMarkable Paper Pro, a digital notepad for writing notes and annotating documents. It looks like a large iPad, but thinner, sharper and also with the e-paper screen that has become a kind of anti-smartphone symbol; a calling card for tech that’s aiming to be more gentle and respectful of its users.

I used the Paper Pro on my desk in place of an A4 notepad to make notes during meetings and jot down stray thoughts and immediately found it impressive. The screen has been carefully designed to create friction as you write across it. It actually feels — and even sounds — like a pencil dragging across paper, and is immensely satisfying to use. Halfway between a paper notepad and a computer, the Paper Pro freed me from the restrictive confines of a Word document. It allowed me to fill my notes with doodles and a blizzard of arrows connecting my ideas, but on a single centralised device with infinite pages and notes that can be easily searched or reorganised. There’s even a function that converts your handwriting instantly to text.

In a world where phones are always trying to do more useful things, these products are defined by what they don’t do. Each gave me back a little of my own time to focus on myself and what I wanted to do away from the lure of the internet.

The most luxurious gadgets I tested had the intention not just of liberating me from distraction, but encouraging me to engage more deeply with what I was doing. If I’m on my phone listening to music, I’m usually also doing five other things, flitting between apps like a hummingbird. I often don’t pay much attention to the music at all.

The prototype turntable PP-2 from Parisian design studio Waiting For Ideas combines radical simplification with beautiful design. It’s a record player that eschews the usual retro aesthetic in favour of clean, modern lines, which nod to German industrial designer Dieter Rams, who created influential work for Braun. Made from a single block of aluminium, it is sleek and ultra-minimalist, intended to be an art object as much as a music player. It has been designed to take the fiddly parts out of playing vinyl. In fact, the entire tonearm is hidden within the device and pops up automatically from underneath when it’s switched on, meaning — oddly — that you have to play your records upside-down. Given that the creator has spoken about returning to the “ritual” of music, it does seem somewhat counterintuitive to remove the classic physical ritual of manually placing the stylus on the record, but it makes for a more streamlined device, both functionally and aesthetically.

Listening to music on a smartphone is so convenient that it’s possible to forget how shallow the experience of listening to algorithmically selected playlists on Spotify can be. “When it comes to music, we’ve stopped listening and started merely consuming it,” Waiting For Ideas’ creative director Jean-Baptiste Anotin told me. “On social media, we listen to just 15 seconds of a song that lasts three minutes and took countless hours to make.”

I used to DJ vinyl and have a decent record collection, so I put the PP-2 through its sonic paces with deep house from Mr Fingers, desert blues by Ali Farka Touré and jazz from Pharoah Sanders. It was a reminder that albums in particular can act as complete artistic statements with a start, middle and end. A record fills the room with sound. Everyone present sits in the company of that album.

The Sigma BF camera is another elegant design object that strips away complexity and encourages you to lean into the activity itself. I’m not a professional photographer, but the camera is designed for everyday users, and I found it very easy to take beautiful pictures without much prior knowledge. The entire device is designed to reduce the features that clutter a regular camera, for example by clearing away settings such as aperture, exposure and ISO to a small second display, so that the main screen can be used purely for composing your shot.

The BF isn’t for photographers who want to disappear into the background: I took it to my brother’s wedding and received many compliments on the device, a fashion accessory as much as a functional tool. It takes seven hours to mill the body of just one of these Japanese cameras from a single block of aluminium (evidently the material of choice in contemporary luxury product design). It feels pleasingly weighty in the hand but still reasonably comfortable to hold.

I found that carrying the camera around for a few days changed how I thought about taking photos. Usually I’ll take a picture with my phone if something leaps out at me. But when I was out carrying the Sigma BF, I was looking at the environment differently, as if it was suddenly made of images for me to find and frame. The device encouraged me to look more deeply at the world around me, dedicating time and thought to the practice of photography. “While smartphones are exceptional devices for effortlessly taking polished, well composed photos, I believe they do very little to inspire a desire to photograph or to spark a heightened awareness of the beautiful moments scattered throughout daily life,” said Sigma chief executive Kazuto Yamaki.

Another camera I tested, the Leica Sofort 2, combined the flexibility of a digital camera with the immediacy of a Polaroid-style instant. It allows you to select a photo you’ve taken on its screen before pulling a crank to print it out immediately and give it to a friend, a reassuring physical touch at a time when we often take endless digital snaps we never look at again.

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By simplifying their approach, the Sigma BF camera and the PP-2 turntable made me feel more present. I found my time with them felt more pleasurable and meaningful than if I was doing the same thing on a smartphone. The aesthetic experience of using a beautiful object was a pleasure in its own right. Yamaki compares it with a particular Japanese tradition: “In the tea ceremony, using beautiful tea utensils goes beyond merely admiring their visual aesthetics; it deeply influences the user’s state of mind and demeanour. It naturally straightens one’s posture, enables deeper concentration on the tea before them and makes the experience of the extraordinary moment much more vivid.”

In his new book The Small Stuff, academic Ian Bogost argues that modern life has progressively distanced us from the sensory pleasures of the physical world through a process he calls “dematerialisation”. Experiences that once involved handling tangible objects, from ticket stubs to cash, increasingly take place through automation or on frictionless glass screens. Experimenting with single-purpose devices reminded me that the pleasures of the sensory world can also be found in technology, such as the spongy buttons of the Habity alarm clock and the gentle friction of the Paper Pro stylus against its textured screen.

The device that reminded me most of the pleasure of touch was the TP-7 field recorder from Swedish designers Teenage Engineering, who are known for their eccentric audio gadgets. The TP-7 is a small device — aluminium, of course — about the size of a deck of cards, which is used for making sound recordings or as part of a music production suite on the go. The highlight of its esoteric design is a spinning disc in the centre that rotates when audio is playing. Like a vinyl record, it can be stopped manually, scratched or rewound to manipulate the sonic output.

The result is a device that, through its design, encourages you to play with it, a philosophy that extends across Teenage Engineering’s products. I felt the giddy gadget high of my childhood again, when I would unspool the reel of a cassette tape or gaze with wonder at the laser disc reader of my PlayStation. I kept returning to the TP-7 because it was so much fun to use, whether I was recording interviews for work or playing with its unusual features (which get rather complex and require an intimidatingly thick instruction manual), such as creating loops to turn environmental noises into experimental sound collages, or playing my own voice recordings backwards as if I were an extra from a David Lynch movie.

My month of gadgets reminded me how much our tools shape our behaviour. Design isn’t just about looking good — it can change the way you live. Over the past decade, my iPhone has slowly reprogrammed me to need it at all times. Technological devices are designed according to a set of values that subtly shape how we live with them in day-to-day life. It’s easy to go along with this blindly, but we don’t have to. We can wrest agency back and be more intentional about the technology in our lives. Not by stubbornly insisting our devices won’t affect our behaviour — that’s an uphill battle — but rather by choosing which tools we welcome into our lives and which ones we reject.

Although it occasionally made my life a little less convenient or my bag a little heavier, I welcomed the diversification of my tech life. It helped me put my smartphone back in its place. Not as a universal switchboard mediating my entire existence. More like just, well, a phone.

DETAILS

• Habity alarm clock £119.99
• Dreamie alarm clock $249
• reMarkable Paper Pro £559
• Sigma BF camera £1,999
• Leica Sofort 2 £360
• Teenage Engineering TP-7 recorder £1,299
• Note: Waiting For Ideas’ PP-2 prototype is not yet available. The PP-1 costs €5,900 (£5,050)

Habity alarm clock £119.99

Dreamie alarm clock $249

reMarkable Paper Pro £559

Sigma BF camera £1,999

Leica Sofort 2 £360

Teenage Engineering TP-7 recorder £1,299

Note: Waiting For Ideas’ PP-2 prototype is not yet available. The PP-1 costs €5,900 (£5,050)

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