every time i talk about flip phones (and this has been going on for years, not just recently) people start going “yeah yeah yeah let's go back i want my nokia back” and i do not understand why this happens. well i do but the point is that i would never even say it because i hated flip phones

in 2002 i had one just like everyone else, and i considered it a “dumbphone” even before smartphones existed. like, sure, as far as making phone calls went, they worked great. they were an obvious evolution from the motorola startac, smaller and more convenient, so i had no beef there. texting was an interesting novelty which i had little use for, particularly in the days where you paid egregious rates per-text, but as an outgrowth of the concept of paging i understood it too.

assuming you wanted a device for making phone calls and sending tiny messages, flip phones were fine, it's just that i didn't want to do those things. i wanted to do the things i do now, on a smartphone, and i wanted a smartphone in order to do them.

long before the iphone existed, long before i'd even touched a PDA, i wanted a smartphone in exactly the form they now have. i am not claiming to be precocious or clairvoyant, it just… wasn't that big a leap. many people have noticed that smartphones got invented about a dozen times throughout the early 20th century in science fiction; star trek did it, i think dick tracy did it, it just kept happening, and it's because it's an incredibly obvious idea. it's so obvious that i wonder if anyone even succeeded at patenting the basic elements; i doubt it, otherwise android probably wouldn't exist.

if you look at the human hand and the human eye and then think about the concept of digital information, moments later you will find yourself holding a drawing of a smartphone, because it's just a dead-simple idea. it is a box designed to nestle in the palm, which can display arbitrary information, and it's sized such that an average human thumb can just about reach across its surface. i, too, imagined this device long before it existed, and was frustrated that i couldn't have one.

once i learned about PDAs, i looked into them ferociously, and immediately became disappointed. have you used palmos? have you used windows mobile? they are bad, clunky, unfortunate things that don't actually deliver the level of information manipulation that i wanted even 22 years ago. the fact that nothing yet existed that could do what we can now do was not important to me; i could see where the wind was blowing, i knew what was going to BECOME possible, and if i couldn't have it yet, i preferred to have nothing instead of a stopgap.

so, once the iphone came along, i aimed myself at it like a heat seeking god damn missile. when a friend upgraded and ditched their 2G, i snapped up that scratched and chipped motherfucker with such gusto that i must have looked like the proverbial convict at the crack in the gas chamber door. hm. is it proverbial if i have no idea where it came from or if anyone else ever says that? anyway, i had been down bad and desperate for almost ten years, so when i got this thing i devoured it like my last god damned meal. huh. another death row allegory. curious

the 2G had been upgraded to ios 2 or 3 or whatever one added real apps. it was slow as molasses. it had a 320×480 screen. it was already unable to run some of the new stuff in the app store. but it was right, it was objectively correct, it was the thing that was supposed to exist, and i finally had it, and i never let it out of my sight ever again because it filled in every single gap in my electronic life. which, at this point in my existence, was simply my entire life.

all this to say: i am a disciple of the smartphone, and a full-contact user. “full-contact” meaning that i use every single part of the animal; nothing goes to waste.

i rocked iphones from the 2G up through the 5, then i got a oneplus one and immediately converted to android because - at that time - it was like flipping a switch from “fisher price My First Portable Supercomputer” to “linux in your pocket” and, for all the hate i give linux (and i give it a lot) i have immense respect for what it used to represent, namely, the platform for people who know what they're doing and are willing to accept the consequences if it turns out that's not true.

this distinction has, admittedly, softened considerably over time. for instance, apple added the ability to manipulate arbitrary files on iphones a few years ago, though i personally still find it clunky and awkward. it feels like going into a five star restaurant and asking for a grilled cheese: even if they make it for you, you're going to get stinkeye the whole time. this is how i feel about the entire apple ecosystem, in fact. on paper it can do anything, but if you want to do something that apple wouldn't like to see happening in one of their TV ads, the UI will make sure you feel like an unwanted guest who is just being tolerated. you aren't exactly unwelcome, but you should probably just use the bathroom, buy a cola at the bar as an unspoken apology, drink two sips, then leave as quietly as possible so everyone can start forgetting the time they had to see someone beneath their status.

but back in 2011 or whenever, android was still the only platform for the absolute jerkoff who wanted to download a ZIP, extract the contents, edit them, then copy them to a USB drive, entirely on their fucking phone. i did, and i still do this kind of bullshit from time to time. not every day, not every week, but often enough that i wouldn't be caught dead with a device that couldn't handle it. and the thing is, regardless of the specific platform, smartphones are just amazing. i am in continuous awe that i am carrying a device in my pocket at all times that can be used to SSH into a server, remote desktop into a windows PC, or create UEFI linux install media literally singlehandedly, as in, using only one hand.

i have used my phone to rip a floppy disk before. earlier today, i paired it via bluetooth to a phone from 2004 in order to sideload a java game, and then i used it to find out if the UPS store was still open or if i'd be wasting a trip heading over there. my phone is simply a hyperportable laptop with a weird UI, and it's so fucking cool that i can own that, so when people say they want to go back to flip phones, i'm just… baffled.

i mean. i'm not really, i'm just saying that for effect, i know what's actually going on. nobody ACTUALLY wants to go back, because if you wanted to, you would. you can still use a flip phone from 15 years ago, but also you can just buy a new one because they still make them. they never stopped. there has never been a time since like 2005 when you couldn't buy a flip phone for $40. walmart is selling them right now for $19.95 in fact. you can just buy one if you want! but you don't, actually!

i mean what would you do with it? make phone calls? i haven't met anyone in over a decade who didn't regard a ringing cellphone the way one would regard a moist paper bag abandoned on a bus seat that is emitting a white mist, so i know you aren't looking to tote around a gadget just for that. text on it? when's the last time you sent a text, an actual SMS, and not an IM on discord or telegram or whatever? the purpose of texting is to get yelled at by relatives, bosses and landlords. everyone you actually trust you talk to online, so i know you don't want to downgrade from “little box that has all my friends in it :)” to “little box whose sole purpose is to let collections people and homophobic aunts bother me.”

also when's the last time you composed text on a dialpad? people complain about touchscreen keyboards and yeah, no, i get it, but when is the last time you texted on a dialpad? things could be, and were, much worse.

when people say they want a flip phone again, what they usually mean (as with most nostalgia) is that they want to be young again, or at least, they want to return to a time when they felt like the world was simpler. the trick with this is that the world was never simple. every generation ends up feeling exactly the way you do right now, after they've been through enough “months that last for years.” that is not a new phenomenon, The Cool Zone has been around forever.

imagine living through the cuban missile crisis or watergate. you spend weeks or months constantly at high stress, and then when it's “over”, it's not over. the ramifications just keep going and going, and you can't un-learn what you've learned, so it's now a part of the algebra for every single thought you have about the world, forever. inevitably, you will pine for anything that reminds you of the time before you had these awful revelations. the fact that the world still sucked doesn't matter, because you didn't know that. ignorance is bliss, and losing yourself in nostalgia is the closest you can get. letting yourself enjoy a sony clie

again, if i'm wrong, prove me wrong: throw out your smartphone and buy a $20 walmart special. i know you won't, because you rightfully consider it absurd to not be able to pull up home depot's website in your car to see if something's in stock before driving across town just to get disappointed and waste 40 minutes. we can crow all we want about being “addicted” to the internet or apps or whatever but if you wanted to stop, you'd just not install them. you aren't staying in bed for three hours in the morning flipping through tiktok because it's a hypnosis program made by some big mind-controlling meanie, it's because you aren't looking forward to getting up. you know what people did in the 80s when they felt like there was no point in getting out of bed because it's all downhill after that? they stayed in bed and did nothing at all. you're just filling the empty space with something instead of nothing.

and yeah, i know there's other downsides to The Black Rectangle being the default option. everyone misses tiny keyboards, but smartphones are a land of compromises, and every single one of them was a necessary part of the pursuit of functionality. every time phones have gotten larger and the bezel has shrunk, i have rubbed my hands together and giggled, because i'm the guy with the SICKOS shirt. i am a full-contact user who wants the largest possible amount of screen real estate and happens to have huge hands, so i hated how tiny the iphone 5 was, and i hate how tiny most smartphones still feel in my hands. but i do understand that this doesn't work for everyone and i sympathize.

it goes completely without saying that the blind pursuit of raw functionality is an injustice that has left many people behind. i have a friend who went FAR out of her way to buy one of the precious few semi-modern android phones with a physical keyboard, and she loves it, despite recognizing how much of a disadvantage it puts her at in some ways. her phone is weird, and limiting, and the screen is tiny, but it's what she needs. i really, really, really wish that our economic system wasn't allergic to variety, because more phones like that should exist. hell, they should make smartphones with keyboards and then a full size portrait screen on top. a phone that's like 12“ tall - i know countless people who would rock it. fuck capitalism. anyway

in summary, i like smartphones. i like where things have ended up, and this is all working out for me, the protagonist of reality. i wish it worked out for more people, but personally i don't want anything all that different from what i'm getting. well, they should put more physical buttons on the phones, THAT'S just free real estate, but otherwise i'm pretty happy and i have no desire at all to RETVRN.

the reason i am dicking with flip phones is because i'm curious about the software situation, a thing i missed out on in its day. J2ME games are a window into a segment of the human experience that i (and probably most nerds) was not part of, partly by choice, partly due to privilege. to wit, when i looked at my Cingular flip phone in 2004 and saw that it could, theoretically, deliver a copy of Bejeweled to me, i reacted with a mix of disinterest and disgust.

disinterest, because i had access to a high powered PC with a huge screen at home, and (being unemployed and supported by my family) nothing stopped me from spending many hours there using it.

disgust, because i saw that PC version as the objectively correct and ideal version of the game, and knew that the flip-phone version would be heavily compromised in comparison. lower resolution, poorer quality sound effects, rougher inputs, fewer stages, etc.

all true, as it turns out - mobile bejeweled is worse than any desktop version, objectively. and yet, those things shouldn't have invalidated Bejeweled For Phones in my eyes. as a shitty teen i regarded it as a scam, or at least a silly waste of money: “if you're going to play a game, do it right. either get a PC or a decent handheld console.” i did not have a worldview broad enough to imagine a person who

• could not afford a PC, or a second handheld device
• or was rarely home
• or who spent a lot of time on public transit
• or who just simply didn't see any need to restrict their Bejeweling to an environment where they could run it on an enormous monitor at 60fps.

part of the maturing of my outlook on life has been to accept that i, like most nerds, am a picky elitist, and that most people literally cannot perceive many of the things that i consider disappointing compromises, or if they can, they simply do not care.

and sure enough, when i posted the clip of J2ME Pac-Man on my YT side channel the other day, a couple dozen people commented immediately, citing various flip phone games that they straight up adored and would like to play again. my elitism was, clearly and unsurprisingly, factually wrong. so i am redressing that, and in the process learning that there was meat on this bone, and had i been a bit less stuck up back in 2006, i could have enjoyed it.