Mainstream media once again says sales of flip phones, like the Nokia 2760, are picking up

Today's smartphones are amazing regardless of whether you're talking about an iPhone or an Android model. Think about all the things that your phone can do for you. You wouldn't be going overboard if you were to say that since January 9th, 2007, the date that the late Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, the world has never been the same. It doesn't matter what you do for a living or what your favorite hobby is. The smartphone adds to the enjoyment of the things you love whether it is listening to music, following your favorite sports teams, reading, keeping up with the news, or more.

According to a report in USA Today, simple flip phones are making a comeback. According to the latest data from What's The Big Data, the average person spends nearly five hours a day on his smartphone. That means the average Joe spends the equivalent of six full days on his smartphone each month. As a result, once or twice a year the mainstream news media runs stories about increasing sales of feature phones to consumers who are frustrated with their smartphones.

Tech entrepreneur Wil Brawley, 49, told USA Today, "If you took an alcoholic who had a problem with alcohol and couldn't control that, then the best thing to do is get the alcohol out of the house, right? So that was sort of how I looked at it." Brawley, who created the restaurant management software company Schedulefly, stopped using his iPhone 11 four years ago and replaced it with a basic Verizon flip phone.

Brawley says, "I didn’t like who I was when I had an iPhone,” he said. “I wasn't present with other people. I was constantly checking emails, texts, sitting at a stoplight looking at my phone, and just constantly grabbing the phone, being distracted, and being distracted when I was with my wife and my kids." Brawley says that having just the flip phone has "been a mental health boon for me." He adds, "The small inconveniences are so enormously outweighed by the positive outcomes for just my presence, my mental health, my anxiety. All of that has improved dramatically."

USA Today says that sales of flip phones (not the foldable clamshell smartphone models like the Galaxy Z Flip or the Motorola Razr) are up in the U.S. for the second consecutive year. 20-year-old college student Wyatt Olson realized in late 2023 that he was spending too much time on his phone. He changed the color of his home screen app icons to grayscale (less stimulation say experts) and set time limits on app usage. But Olson said that this wasn't enough.

At the beginning of this year, he left his iPhone with his mom and sister and switched to a Nokia 2760 Flip. How are things going as he approaches the six-month mark since his switch? "I love it. I’ve always been a phone call person, and this actually makes it easier for me to talk to my friends rather than text. I have a legitimate excuse because I’m not going to spend two minutes texting you back,” Olson says.  He now streams music from his laptop but admits navigation has been a challenge without Google Maps or Waze.

Sorry, I can't follow along with this. I love using my smartphone and I'm not going to apologize for feeling that way. If you want to take some stand because you can't mentally deal with owning a smartphone, I understand. You need to do whatever it is that makes you feel better. Just don't start a whole campaign trying to persuade trying to convince others who are happy with their smartphones that they need to switch to a Nokia 2760 Flip.

And for those of you who did switch because you wanted to feel like a rebel, the next time you get stuck in a four-hour traffic jam on the highway because you didn't have Google Maps to warn you to take an alternate route, remember the conveniences of having a smartphone rather than a feature phone.