When Leigh Tynan agreed to give her 13-year-old daughter a cell phone, she didn’t want him to be distracted.
“When there’s a smartphone or a screen, you don’t practice guitar, you don’t read a book, you just don’t get bored,” she said. So instead of the very popular iPhone, she settled on a TCL Flip phone, with one key feature: no access to social media.
“I just thought I really don’t feel comfortable with her being online all the time … I’m trying to protect her from that as long as possible.”
Dumbphones, also known as simple phones or feature phones, are having a moment. Mobile devices are limited to basic functions such as making phone calls and sending text messages and often cannot connect to the Internet. According to Counterpoint, a technology market research firm, more than 98,600 feature phones were sold in Canada in 2023 — a 25 percent increase from 2022.
While dumb phones have long been popular with seniors and marketers, there are new demands from parents trying to protect their children from the distracting features of smartphones. Durability and cost are also attractive: Most voice phones sell for less than $100.
Tynan’s rotary phone dropped to $80, plus she pays about $26 a month for the talk and text plan.
Some Gen Zers and millennials are also making the switch as they try to digitally detox from an ever-connected world.
“The smartphone is no longer a source of pleasure,” said Pascal Forget, a technology columnist in Montreal. “It used to be fun, but now they’re addicted to it, so they want to go back to simpler times using a simpler device.”
Dumbphone users like Kristen Campbell who have taken the plunge say the results are worth it.
The 34-year-old from Calgary ditched her smartphone last year, testing about 15 different devices before settling on the Qin F22.
“When a friend wants to borrow one or try dumbphone living, they just come to me,” she said.
Campbell said she realized the amount of time she was spending scrolling through her phone was a problem, and she took great joy in deleting her social media accounts.
“I’m still accessible, but I live my life where I am in that moment, rather than constantly being somewhere else mentally,” she said. “I just felt a lot calmer and a lot happier.”
Dumphones still a niche product
But dumb phones remain a niche product, accounting for less than one per cent of the total mobile phone market in Canada, according to Counterpoint. Forget says many companies have little incentive to offer them.
“You can’t sell data packs, you can’t sell apps, you can’t sell subscriptions on a minimalist phone. So it’s hard for a company to make money from them.”
HMD Global is still making flip phones. The company saw sales of its Nokia 2660 Flip phone double in Europe last year and has relaunched a model that first debuted in 1999.
“It’s really cool to see a phone that we thought was finished … we thought we’d never use this phone again and now it’s being taken away,” said chief marketing officer Lars Silberbauer.
Brooklyn-based Light just released the third generation of its Light phone. With a black-and-white screen and no email, social media or web browsing, it retails for $399, making it about four times more expensive than other medical phones.
While it’s not yet available in Canada, co-founder Kaiwei Tang said the company is in talks with Telus and hopes to bring the Light Phone here later this year.
Tang said the device was built for modern utility and with the view that technology should work in the background — and he hopes that will gain momentum.
“We’d actually like to see more players come in or even big companies create tools that don’t rely on people’s time, attention and data to make money.”
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