Until recently, I was the proud owner of an HTC Magic running the Android operating system. Well, I say proud. Actually I got more and more fed up with it, until by the end of my two-year contract I actually longed to be rid of it. So I ditched it and got a Nokia 6303i instead. Here’s why…

• Freedom from the plug. The HTC needed juice every single night if it was going to get through a day of normal use. My dumbphone, by contrast, can go for almost a week without a sniff of electricity. No more am I a slave to the demands of a touchscreen tyrant.
• Actual portability. OK, a smartphone will fit in your pocket. But only in the same way that a wallet or a pack of cards will fit in there – i.e., not very comfortably. Dumbphones really are designed to be carried everywhere without constantly reminding you how big and heavy they are.
• No pussyfooting. Much as I’d like to spend my days posing in urban coffee shops, the truth is I’m usually either in my office or in the park, handing out fruit squash in a sandy environment. And having to care for a tender little touchscreen in a soft white faux-leather pouch doesn’t really fit with that. I need a phone that can take care of itself.
• Social media cold turkey. No longer do I itch to check my replies on Twitter, or share a photo of my lunch – because I can’t. And I don’t miss it at all. Instead of going online in every spare second, I try to appreciate the places I am and the things I’m doing. (See How social media ruined our lives for more on this theme.)
• Quick and easy. By the time my HTC was updated with the latest version of Android, it had become incredibly slow. Starting up took about three minutes, and shutting down wasn’t much quicker. The camera, pointlessly tarted up with redundant animations and backgrounds, was almost unusable. Maybe it was intended to encourage me to upgrade – instead I went for a dumbphone, and now enjoy a snappy, responsive device that ‘just works’.

Tags: dumbphone, HTC Magic, Nokia 6303i