Tech Review - Is This the Killer Digital Detox Flip Phone?

Introduction

I don’t suppose I need to describe at length what “digital detox” is … surely the national dialogue around this is as ubiquitous as, well, phone addiction. According to this Pew survey, “As smartphones and other internet-connected devices have become more widespread, 31% of U.S. adults now report that they go online ‘almost constantly,’ up from 21% in 2015.” The idea that we could wean ourselves is attractive (particularly since tech companies are fighting any regulation of their products, such as modifications to make them less addictive). An article in the New York Times nicely summarizes our own role in this addiction:

In reality, [the writer Oliver] Burkeman said, whatever you’re working on triggers an unpleasant emotion in you — perhaps boredom, or fear of not being able to complete the task at hand, or concern about not having enough time. You take refuge in your phone in order to escape those uncomfortable feelings.

Another Times article, wherein the author describes her month-long switch to a basic flip phone to fight her own online excesses, recounts that “after about two weeks, I noticed I’d lost my ‘thumb twitch’ — a physical urge to check my phone in the morning, at red lights, waiting for an elevator or at any other moment when my mind had a brief opportunity to wander.”

I have recently purchased and set up what I think might be the perfect flip phone for breaking the cycle of constant phone use while still keeping some of the core features of smartphones that people really do rely on. If you’re considering the switch, or (better yet!) choosing a flip-style phone as your teenager’s first, or would like to know the state of the art in flip phones in case addiction becomes a problem for your or a friend or family member, read on for a full review.

But first…

Full disclosure: I didn’t buy this phone for myself. (I know, that sounds about as authentic as “I’m asking for a friend.”) I will confess that I struggle somewhat to limit my own smartphone use, and do fall prey to the pitfall of unlocking my phone to obtain one piece of information (e.g., current pollen count, since my eyes are itchy) only to see something on my screen that drags me into another investigation (e.g., has the Times approved my bagel comment yet?) and before I know it I’m snared in some article and only when I’ve finally freed myself do I realize—with a stab of remorse—that I can’t remember why I unlocked my phone in the first place.

Whew! That was a long aside considering I was trying to explain why I myself don’t actually need  to switch to a flip phone. I guess I trust in my own discipline to mitigate my usage of this troublesome tool. I fancy myself to be like the well-trained dog that will let the milk bone balance on my snout for as long as it takes for my master to say, “Okay, now Waldo!” except that I’m both the dog and the master (or at least think I am).

The fact is, I bought the flip phone for my younger daughter, who (as I explained in a previous post) wants nothing to do with the always-online, phone-addicted social media realm. (She needed to upgrade from her extremely dumb brick-style phone to something more durable, and thought with a flip phone at least the screen would be protected.) It strikes me that a phone that cannot addict the user in the first place must surely be the same phone that a recovering addict would benefit from.

(So why didn’t my daughter choose her flip phone herself? Because she doesn’t care. Part of choosing a phone is caring about it and geeking out over the selection process, and she can’t be bothered. She’d as soon clean out the cat box as buy a phone, and just as I’m the one who shares an office with the cat box—my daughters having fled the coop—I’m the guy who handles the IT headaches for the family.)

What does a flip phone really need?

Obviously this post wouldn’t have any purpose if all flip phones were interchangeable. But they’re not. Some are quite expensive (kind of lame when you’re looking for minimal capabilities) and some lack the features we may really need in a pinch. Here are the characteristics I think a flip phone should have:

• Voice service that actually works – ideally WiFi calling and 4G LTE
• Basic texting ability – but not more than that
• Decent battery life – ought to be a strong suit for a flip phone
• Lack of a full keyboard – a key component (pun intended, sorry) of making it hard to use
• Nonstandard operating system – removes you from the universe of time-sucking apps
• Pronounced lack of good games – because life is too short
• A basic camera – useful for informational snapshots
• A music player – because nobody has a standalone MP3 player anymore
• GPS – because let’s face it, modern man has lost the ability to navigate

The phone I eventually selected for my daughter, the Nokia 2780, has all this—and more! (And no, I’m not getting any kind of compensation from Nokia, which I would be required to disclose. And while I’m being parenthetical, don’t try to buy this phone from Amazon. Their janky seller strung me along for weeks and never actually shipped anything. I got it from Best Buy with no hassle, and no, they didn’t give me a kickback either.)

So here is how the 2780 stacks up in terms of my wish list.

The basics

First of all, this phone is cheap: about $100 including tax. It also has a nice form factor … compact but not too stingy, and the lid flips up with a satisfying spring (like a communicator from the original Star Trek), which pleases me. Here’s the closed-up view.

And here it is flipped open (cat included for scale). It’s easy to cradle this on your neck like we used to do with landline phones.

Voice service

Part of the point of a flip phone is to return to the good old days of talking live to another human … it’s not supposed to turn us into hermits. (Quite the opposite, in fact.) This Nokia works as a phone and sounds great. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to have a speakerphone feature, but it has great hands-free options that I’ll get into later. It supports 4G LTE, which you don’t find on all dumb phones these days, and this is important because the major carriers are shutting down their 3G networks. Best of all, this phone supports WiFi calling, which is a godsend indoors where cellular signals often don’t carry well.

Basic texting ability

You can send and receive basic texts on this phone (though the typing is clunky, as I’ll get to in a moment), and you can even send and receive pictures (which true SMS texting apps, such as found on very dumb phones, cannot). This is arguably semi-important because so many people still want to send you a photo and who wants to be a party pooper? But fear not, there’s a limit to the nonsense; GIF images come through but only as static images.

Battery life

I didn’t run a full battery of tests (pun intended, couldn’t resist) like CNET would, but I ran this thing hard (configuring, exploring, making test calls, adding contacts, etc.) and it did fine, with half its battery left after about half a day of use. Thus, a charge should last at least a full day, and the battery will probably do great on standby, though I doubt it’ll last for weeks like with truly old-school phones. There’s a configurable low-battery mode, and you can choose if and when to automatically switch to it. One nice feature is the USB-C charging port, because USB-A is no longer cute and we’re finally starting to get rid of all those old chargers.

Something else to consider is that this phone doesn’t have any modern A.I. capabilities, which saves energy beyond the phone’s own battery. ChatGPT, according to a Google query I just ran, uses over half a million kilowatts a day, which could power 180,000 US households. And ChatGPT uses over half a liter of water (i.e., more than a pint) just to write a 100-word email. This phone, by eschewing such stuff, is certainly greener.

Lack of a full keyboard

Let’s face it, typing with only nine keys (e.g., hitting the 2 key once for A, twice for B, three times for C, or four times for 2) is a pain in the neck, and will stop you in your tracks if you start to tell your entire life story in a text message. So instead of sending and receiving 20 texts about when and where to meet a friend, you’ll just make a one-minute phone call, and in the process you’ll get to hear your friend’s voice and remind her how convenient talking is.

The Nokia 2780 offers a particularly good (i.e., bad) implementation of 9-key typing. It tries to emulate smartphones by employing, by default, predictive typing, where you get far enough into a word that it can guess, and suggest, the rest. This works great on a smartphone—and not at all on this phone. I tried to type “hi” by hitting the 4 key twice, to get the H, but the stupid phone decided I wanted a word starting with G and suggested words like gig and gee. There was no way to stop it from assuming G was the first letter; I could not make it understand I wanted a word starting with H. Since “hi” must be one of the most frequent opening words of any text thread, it’s particularly frustrating that you can only get G-words. What useful words start with G? Gig? Gigolo? Giraffe? What’s worse, when you turn off predictive typing, this silly phone doesn’t remember your preference. You have to turn off predictive typing again every time you type.

As someone who appreciates a well-conceived, elegant user interface, I’m completely appalled. But as someone who knows how beguiling texting can be, and how oddly fast a human can get at typing with nine keys, I absolutely love this. It’s like the poison pill, damning any tendency the user might have to conduct non-voice communications.

Nonstandard operating system

This Nokia runs on KaiOS, a proprietary (yay!) platform that nobody, I mean nobody, is writing apps for. This is like a giant firewall protecting the user from giving in, again and again, and installing this or that single-purpose app, like so many appliances cluttering up the kitchen counter. My own smartphone has almost 200 apps, even though I feel like I truly do try to limit them. To not have the Apple or Android OS is the singular feature—the absolute minimum characteristic—required to really call this a digital detox phone.

That said, the phone does have a web browser. This could be a deal-breaker for those trying to live only in the real world, except that the browser works pretty poorly, thank goodness. It’s just useable enough that the user could go to a mobile-optimized website, such as Blogger, and do some light reading while, say, stuck in a line. This sometimes really comes in handy for me, when I somehow end up waiting around for half an hour and forgot to bring a book. And reading good stuff is a lot different from getting dragged into TikTok or something.

One nontrivial use for a simple browser would be the ability to check in for a flight and download the boarding pass with its QR code. This is really handy when you’ve traveled to some place where you don’t have access to a printer, and don’t want to have to print your boarding pass at the airport. It’s also nice to do a quick search for, say, a good taqueria when you’re traveling.

I regret to inform you that the 2780 does have Instagram. I didn’t set that up, needless to say, because just like me, my daughter wants nothing to do with it or any other social media platform, but at least I can say this CNET reviewer found the Insta experience highly lacking on this phone, complaining that “the interface was squished and its cursor was laggy as well” and “the quality wasn’t great.” Whew! The 2780 dodged a bullet there. (This reviewer concluded that using this phone made her “anxious” and “very uncomfortable” because her smartphone is like “an adult pacifier,” and instead of this being a wake-up call she concluded that she’s “more attached to [her] iPhone 15 Pro Max than ever,” which I find defeatist and a bit depressing. But then, as a CNET writer she can’t exactly become a neo-Luddite anyway.)

Pronounced lack of good games

This phone offers Snake, which (like all games) I’ve never played, but it looks pretty damn boring to me:

There are other games, but they look childish and clunky and how could they not be, when the screen is so small and lo-res?

At least a user who indulges in these games to escape his thoughts will feel extra foolish. It also appears that downloading new games would be impossible; presumably there’s no KaiOS equivalent of an App Store or Play Store, or if there is it’s limited and lame.

Basic camera

The camera on this phone is decent, which is to say totally lame compared to the highly advanced (and yet absurdly flawed) cameras on modern smartphones. The point here isn’t to get amazing photos that will wow your friends, but to get a snapshot to capture information. For example, you’re starting a hike and want a shot of the trail map, or you just parked your car and want to quickly record the location. And if you’re a middle-aged person with failing eyesight, it’s also a good enough camera to photograph a menu, so you can zoom in on it. The camera even supports video with sound (again, mainly so you can get a picture of something and easily attach contextual narrative). But you won’t be tempted to turn your life into a real-time photo chronicle, which I imagine your friends and family will (secretly) appreciate.

Music player

This might not seem like a big deal, but honestly, it’s nice to have music, which is really not the kind of distraction we’re trying to avoid. Menial tasks like housekeeping are a lot more tolerable with background music, and less intrusive, in my opinion, than podcasts. We all paid good money for MP3 players back in the day, and just because you’re forsaking your smartphone doesn’t mean you should have to carry around two devices (even if you could find your old iPod).

This phone has a really great music player, which not only organizes your MP3 files but includes the album artwork:

The point of those funky earbuds shown in the photo above is that this phone supports Bluetooth, so you can have great quality sound from your favorite earbuds or speaker. There’s an old-school 3.5mm jack if you’re looking to use, say, your kickass Sennheiser HD 800 S over-ear headphones. Now, in terms of storage, this phone has a micro-SD slot that will take up to a 32 GB card, which should be plenty. And it’s easy to install and configure the extra storage.

In addition to the MP3 player, this phone has an FM radio, and the app is pretty nicely designed (e.g., it automatically finds all the stations in your area and you can save your favorites). Oddly, you cannot use the radio with Bluetooth—it requires you to plug in wired earbuds or headphones. I suspect this is because it relies on them for reception, like an ersatz antenna. Perhaps you still have decent old-school earbuds lying around and won’t have to settle for the crap earbuds the airline gave you (if it even did).

GPS & Google Maps

As we all know, depression is increasing among men. I have a pet theory that part of the cause of this is that men never provide or receive directions anymore. By my non-scientific rough estimate, as recently as the ‘80s navigation represented at least half of all dialogue between males. We’d yack incessantly about not only the best route to take somewhere, but about what route we just took and how well that worked out for us. Now, Google Maps and their GPS-connected ilk, by knowing and sharing the single best route at any moment in time, have made this entire conversational topic unnecessary. GPS is like the opposite of a men extender. It reduces about half of our utility overall … no wonder we’re suffering.

Mental health epidemiology aside, the result of this ubiquitous technology is that if you ask for directions, you probably won’t get them anymore because mankind has now entirely lost the ability to navigate. You’ll just get a shrug which means, “I dunno, just use GPS.” (I try to offer directions sometimes and get the same shrug.) So what happens when you are doing digital detox and have forsaken your smartphone? Well, at least this phone has GPS and Google Maps, with all its essential functionality (e.g., you can search by business name without having to know the address). It’s not going to be that easy to use, and I’m certainly not recommending you try to squint at the 2780’s screen while driving, but you can at least review the route in advance and/or hand the phone to your passenger. (See? This phone encourages carpooling, another win for the planet!)

In case privacy is one of your motivations for choosing a flip phone, I’m happy to report that it’s easy, with this phone, to tell the app not to share your travel history with Google.

Extras

So does this phone have anything I wouldn’t want or need? Or that I didn’t realize I needed? Well, it does support email. I’m not sure how easy this would be to configure, and surely not all providers are supported, but I’ll bet you could fetch your Gmail on it.

This might not be a bad thing … the inability to check for an email you’re expecting might be distracting, though how far this goes could interfere with your detox. At least you won’t be tempted to reply via your phone, since its 9-key predictive typing is so gloriously clumsy and slow.

There’s one other feature I didn’t expect to see: a news app.

Such is my antipathy for algorithm-fueled Internet news, especially during election season, I didn’t even launch this app to try it out. I can only hope it’s the worst user experience ever conceived of for a phone, because if doomscrolling is convenient with the Nokia 2780, the terrorists (i.e., Big Tech) have already won.

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The Samsung Smartphone Iris Scanner

Introduction

I have a new smartphone that can use biometric technology—specifically, an iris scanner—to authenticate me (i.e., to unlock itself). Though I was initially thrilled at the space-age modernity and ease of this feature, I ultimately decided not to continue using it, for a reason that may surprise you.

Why biometrics?

Biometric authentication might seem to some like a solution looking for a problem. Why not just use a password or PIN to unlock a phone or other device? Actually, static passwords are pretty fallible. People are lazy and choose really lame passwords. It’s also possible to intercept them; both my daughters managed to learn my smartphone’s PIN by looking over my shoulder.

But that’s not actually the biggest problem with traditional authentication. After all, security can be increased by using two factors, e.g., a static PIN or password plus a token or app that generates a new password every minute. But this process is annoying. To securely connect my work PC requires a complicated password to unlock it, followed by VPN authentication involving a numeric user ID, an 8-digit static PIN, and a 6-digit constantly changing PIN that I need to get from my phone, which (until recently) required that I unlock it with yet another 6-digit PIN. That’s 42 keystrokes total.

Meanwhile, throughout the day I’m typing this or that other username and password to reach various resources; I have well over 100 different logins to keep track of. Most of the time, the password field you type into doesn’t show you what you’re typing—just asterisks. This leads to typos, of course, so you have to start over. If you’re at a café, this makes sense, but don’t most of us work in an office or at home 90% of the time? Why not show the password by default and have an optional “mask” button for public spaces?

This is where fingerprint readers, facial recognition, and iris scanning can really help. They’re faster and easier, removing an annoyingly repetitive behavior.

Samsung optical recognition

My new Samsung Galaxy S9+ phone has three ways of optically authenticating the user. It can use facial recognition (i.e., using the front-facing camera to see if it’s my face); it can use an infrared scanner to inspect my irises and compare them to the baseline image I stored in the phone; or it can use both. In practice, the facial recognition isn’t considered secure enough for sensitive applications. The combined method is also pointless, because the phone tries the less rigorous facial recognition method first, thus dispensing with the secure iris scan most of the time. In practice, only the iris scanner by itself makes any sense.

So, does the iris scanning work? There are two definitions of “work.” First, the phone needs to easily perform the test and unlock itself, without any false negatives (i.e., failing to recognize my irises). On top of this, the authentication has to actually be secure (i.e., avoid being circumvented by a malicious actor).

At first blush, the iris scan seems great. You swipe up from the bottom of the touch-screen to tell the phone to scan you; then, a fraction of a second later, your phone is unlocked. It’s like magic, and far easier than the six-digit PIN I had to type on my old phone. (That was actually seven taps total: the PIN and then—pointlessly—having to tap Enter.)

As far as whether the technology really is secure, that’s harder to ascertain because it’s like proving a negative. But honestly, I don’t care if it’s completely foolproof. For me, the security needs to meet exactly two standards: 1) my employer’s IT department trusts it; and 2) Google Pay trusts it. I don’t see that there’s that much real risk involved here. After all, what are the odds that a malicious actor will gain physical access to my phone? Negligible. And if someone did, well, I’d kick his ass! (Meanwhile, if I were to lose my phone, one quick phone call to corporate IT would have it wiped clean—i.e., “bricked”—within minutes.)

That said, this is a full-service blog so I’ll share what my cursory Internet research turned up. Yes, somebody has already hacked this technology. They used a digital camera with an infrared light, captured a photo of somebody’s irises, printed it out, and then put a contact lens over the iris in the printout to create the right curvature. One article called this “alarmingly easy” but is it, really? I don’t typically let strangers take a photo of my irises in infrared mode from three feet away without my consent. Meanwhile, let’s not forget that this methodology still requires that the malicious actor get physical access to my phone. How’s he gonna do that? And what exactly does he hope to get off my phone … my beer photos?

Anybody who fixates on security measures involving physical access is missing the point. This is not how hackers operate. Let me explain how they actually do their thing. Recently I was sitting in a doctor’s office reading Readers Digest and came across an “article” (i.e., thinly veiled ad) for a free app that gives emergency first responders a way to get pertinent info off your phone if they find you unconscious in a ditch. They will want to find out if you have any medical conditions, and have a way to contact your family members to let them know you’ve been in an accident. Without a screen lock this is pretty easy—they just call the last number you dialed, or sift through your contacts. But with a screen lock, things get harder. The app described by the Reader’s Digest article makes your medical information and emergency contacts available when your phone is still locked. Pretty cool, right?

Well, no, as it turns out. I downloaded the app and read the privacy policy. (If you never do this, you might consider starting, particularly when the creator of an app isn’t Google or Apple.) I discovered that this software monitors and reports all your browsing activity, even when you’re not using the app! In other words, it’s egregiously violating your privacy (which is why it’s offered for free). That’s the real risk, folks … not somebody stealing your phone and using it.

(By the way, if you want to make your emergency info available to first responders via your locked phone, check the website of your phone manufacturer. My old Motorola phones supported this natively, as does my Samsung.)

 The problem with optical scanning

So the Samsung iris scan looks pretty good, right? If so why this post? Well, as is so often the case, the honeymoon was brief.

A few days into my use of the iris scan authentication, I started having some problems. Usually the scan was almost instant, but then I challenged it in several ways. I used it while wearing contact lenses, then glasses, then sunglasses. With the first two, the phone had to work a little harder to get a good scan, but eventually worked. With sunglasses—no dice.

Still no big deal, right? But over time, seemingly as I myself got tired, this phone seemed to be working harder and harder to authenticate me. Things got worse in the evening, perhaps due to low ambient light and/or my increasingly dilated pupils. Instead of just flickering, the screen was putting two circles on the screen for me to align my eyes with. I couldn’t get a screenshot of this, but here’s how Samsung depicts it:

Still not a big deal, but not instant and automatic either. It had me doing a little bit of work, and I don’t like doing a little bit of work. I’m a Californian, man! I don’t have time for instant gratification! Moreover, I had the distinct sense that having this red light shining in my eyes was starting to cause discomfort.

Could this discomfort be in my head? Absolutely! Try this thought exercise: do you feel a little bit of an itch right now, on your head? Just a little? Doesn’t it kind of feel like something is crawling on it? Weren’t you sitting under a tree earlier? Isn’t this the season for spiders? Isn’t it entirely possible that one dropped down into your hair? There’s a little itch—admit it. You have to scratch now, don’t you? I do, and I’m the perpetrator of this ruse! (Don’t you feel a yawn coming on, too?)

The point is, any fear of side effects with this technology can start to niggle, and a little fear isn’t unreasonable. A government facility employing iris scans would screen you once every few days or weeks. But phones? We unlock these devices many dozens of times a day. I don’t think it’s irrational to wonder if frequent iris scanning might cause a cumulative problem. After all, this use of the technology is totally new.

I’m clearly not the first person to wonder if this is safe. Consider the second Google autocomplete suggestion that appeared when I typed “samsung iris scanner”:

As luck would have it, I had the opportunity to talk to a Samsung engineer about the safety of this feature. (Never mind how.) I should point out that our conversation was basically off the record. (I didn’t present myself as a blogger, because I don’t enjoy having people laugh in my face.) I also want to be clear that this guy didn’t utter a single sentence that would incriminate Samsung in any way. Everything he said indicated an essential trust in this technology.

At the same time, there were some nonverbal cues indicating that perhaps he’s not entirely confident that there’s zero risk here. This wasn’t just my interpretation … several others witnessing the exchange chuckled out loud a couple times. Due to the very essence of nonverbal communication, I cannot explain exactly how he hedged. Perhaps the most tangible detail I can convey is this cryptic statement he made, in response to my question about the high number of scans these phones are doing: “Everything in moderation, including moderation, right?”

(It was a great tech-geek conversation, by the way. The oddest thing he said was, “You can remove your irises!” I pictured a gory self-surgery for a moment before realizing he meant I could remove the stored benchmark image and try again. The idea is, if I had captured the baseline iris scan in bright daylight, then the authentication scans would also work best in bright daylight. You can experiment with different lighting conditions to capture the best sample, which will make scans work in the widest variety of conditions. The phone has an almost comically named “Manage Irises” menu for this.)

In the final analysis, I didn’t find any legitimate reason to act on my concerns … I recognize them as knee-jerk reactions, more paranoid than rational. There’s just not enough there to suggest a safety problem with this authentication method. But there’s a less slippery aspect to it that ultimately did cause me to abandon it anyway. Look at this photo:

What do you notice about that photo, particularly in contrast to the one before it? The guy in the photo looks pretty tired, doesn’t he? The Samsung photo is much nicer. The woman—surely a model—has really nice smiling blue eyes. If I looked like her, I might actually enjoy iris scans. Hell, I’d probably even snap selfies! I might even use Instagram! But the reality is much different. Unlocking my phone, particularly during the evenings after a hard day, became downright demoralizing. Here’s what I found myself looking at:

Look at those bags under my eyes! It’s depressing! I also don’t have any eyebrows left. Where the hell did they go? I used to have eyebrows. In fact, I had very nice eyebrows. I think they were my best feature—and now they’re gone … at some point they just straight-up vacated. Another ravage of age. And the above photo doesn’t even capture the expression my eyes would betray during these scans … it was one of confusion and frustration, which are decidedly unflattering.

I’m not kidding here: these iris scans were making me feel old and lost. Haven’t these damn phones, with their social media and their selfies, done enough to undermine our self esteem, without reminding us, through this new form of scrutiny, how tired and doddering so many of us have become?

The solution

Happily, there was an elegant solution to my quandary: I switched to the fingerprint reader. I’d initially refused to consider this technology because I cannot stand it on my iPad Air. That device’s fingerprint reader has always enraged me. It works about one in ten times. Typically I try it three times in a row to no avail, and then the iPad gives up and makes me type my password. So it’s actually adding effort and frustration, the net result being I almost never use my iPad for anything. It just sits in a drawer.

Samsung, on the other hand, has a great fingerprint reader. For one thing, it’s located on the back of the phone, which just makes sense. Plus, it happens to work perfectly. Furthermore, it offers a significant extra advantage: you don’t have to “wake up” the phone to use it. With the iris scanner, you have to un-snooze the phone by pressing a button on the side, and then you swipe up on the screen, point your eyes at the phone, and then it does the scan. With the fingerprint reader, even if the phone is sound asleep, you just touch the reader and the phone unlocks. I can do this in the same motion as pulling my phone out of my pocket, so it’s instantly ready to use. Moreover, the phone can store multiple fingerprints, so another trusted person (e.g., your spouse) can borrow it (e.g., you’re driving and he or she wants to navigate). I give Samsung’s fingerprint authentication an A+ … they really nailed it.

(No, Samsung didn’t give me a free phone or anything for writing this; I’d be required to disclose that if they did. So, if anyone from Samsung is reading this: you’re welcome.)

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How Android Wrecked My Morning

Introduction

Ever had your sleep shattered by a way-too-early phone call?  Well, at least that scenario requires an evil or bumbling human at the other end of the phone.  I found out recently that these modern phones can ruin your morning all by themselves, by trying too hard to be smart.  Read on for my sad tale (and the frightening questions it raises).

How Android wrecked my morning

The alarm clock on my Android phone shattered my sleep.  The noise was crazily close to my face and as I struggled to make sense of my situation I realized my wife was holding the phone out to me in a wordless plea to have it silenced.

I keep the phone on the table at the other side of the bed, out of reach.  This is to keep me from groping blindly for it, knocking it off the table, and breaking its face, as I’d done with my Blackberry years ago.  The key to not disrupting my wife is to make this phone my backup alarm.  The primary alarm is a clock radio on my side of the bed.

Usually I wake up before my alarm and can disarm it before it makes a sound.  I felt bad for waking my wife, but also a bit smug at having this backup-alarm system which was so clearly warranted on this occasion.  I now discovered the clock radio was an hour slow! 

As I was running late, I didn’t have time to make tea before my early conference call.  I grabbed a mug to nuke some water for instant coffee.  The microwave oven display, instead of showing the time, had a message scrolling by:  “Enjoy your meal.”

I hate this message.  First of all, it shows a fundamental flaw in this oven’s character.  The oven acts like it knows what’s what, but it’s only guessing.  (More often than not, it isn’t heating a whole meal, but just thawing something, pre-cooking an ingredient, or heating a snack.)  Second, this message means somebody forgot something in there, which in this case meant overnight.  What was it?  Feast your eyes on this!

My wife must be one of the few people on the planet who buys lima beans.  Why does she do it?  Does she feel sorry for the lima bean growers?  Or is she reminding my family that not everything we eat needs to be a delicious taste sensation?  Needless to say nobody missed these at dinner.

But when I closed the door, the oven display reverted to showing the time, and to my astonishment it was an hour off!  Or to be more accurate, it now showed my phone to be an hour off.  I never should have doubted my clock radio.

Isn’t it funny how much authority these smartphones get?  I hadn’t even considered it could be the culprit, because the phone sets its clock automagically!  The phone “just works”—except when it doesn’t.  From now on, I’ll trust the device that doesn’t have an operating system.

I pulled up my Android clock and noticed two weirdnesses:

The obvious thing was that it was an hour fast.  But the other weirdness was the second clock, labeled “Home.”  Somehow my phone had decided I’d traveled to another time zone:  Mountain Daylight Time.

On what basis did it decide this?  Beats me.  I keep the GPS turned off.  The “Automatic” time zone is based on the “network-provided” time.  Well, what network?  The WiFi network, some Internet server, or the 4G/LTE?  It’s vague in the accountability-avoiding “mistakes were made” kind of way.  I turned off WiFi but the phone didn’t revise its time zone.

As it turned out, I had a way to see if the culprit was really “the network.”  We happened to have a houseguest with an Android phone on the same carrier, and its clock was correct.  She theorized, “Your phone must have been keying off mine.  Mine’s set to Arizona!”

Great theory!  I hypothesized that one phone is always dominant, and will cause others in its vicinity to fall in line.  Kind of like how the menstrual cycles of female roommates will tend to sync up.

But there was a flaw in this theory:  Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving time.  This time of year, Pacific Daylight is the same as Mountain Standard.

I’ve given up devising an alternate theory; we’ll just have to chalk this up to a software bug, which perhaps only crops up when this specific OS is loaded on this specific phone with these specific apps and during these specific moon phases and when the phone’s owner is of this specific Zodiac sign, etc.

Rebooting the phone fixed the clock, until a few nights later when it slipped back to Mountain Daylight Time again.  The only real solution is to disable “Automatic time zone,” at least until Google fixes this bug.

Of course, I sussed all this out hours later.  At the time, I had a short-term problem:  I was up an hour earlier than I meant to be, with nothing to do, and was bleary, sleepy, and also pissed off.  It’s hard for me to fall back asleep after even a minor skirmish with hi-tech devices, and moreover when I’m angry.  So I lay in bed wishing I could be either asleep or fully awake instead of in this purgatory.  I tried to remember the dream I’d been having before being jolted awake.

I’d had this dream in my head—I mean my waking head—before going downstairs.  The whole thing was there intact, but now it was completely gone.  The great dream eraser had make a clean sweep.  But I tried and tried and suddenly my dream came back to me.  I’d been dreaming about my phone, coincidentally enough.

In this dream, I’d decided to head to San Francisco for some Christmas shopping.  The streets were all flooded to within a few feet of the tops of lampposts, so I was traveling by canoe.  My canoe started taking on water, and suddenly it was up to my waist.  Oh, no—my phone!  I took it out and it was all full of water.  I went home, cleaned off my desk, turned on a powerful lamp, and began taking apart the phone.  Each piece, once removed, suddenly grew to like ten times its former size.  This made it really easy to dry each piece off.  Before I knew it, I had a massive pile of chips, transistors, capacitors, and printed circuit boards, all comically oversized.  It was a bit like playing with Lego.  I reasoned that the phone manufacturer had set it up this way to facilitate the assembly process.

Now, where had Motorola gotten this idea?  Well, like all truly ingenious ideas, it must have come from an English major.  And suddenly the literary precedent was obvious:  the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  Dr. Frankenstein (the inventor) decides to make his creature large, so that the components will be easier to manipulate:

As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; this is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.

How fitting that this dream should prefigure the failure of my phone:  like Frankenstein’s monster, and like so many other hi-tech products, it has a tendency to break loose from the control of its creator.  How large a problem this becomes may be determined by how large a project Google and its ilk undertake.  It’s one thing to have your morning ruined by a Frankenphone; how much damage could be caused by a Frankencar, a Frankenhome, or a Frankendrone?

Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity

Introduction

Well, well, well.  I have a new smartphone.  No, this post isn’t a review of that phone, per se; I won’t compare it to the iPhone 6, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, or any other phone, though I wouldn’t mind attracting traffic to this blog based on those keywords.  Today’s topic is the artificial intelligence, or lack thereof, in my new device.  In particular I’ll attempt to introduce a new term:  Artificial Stupidity.

My phone

I chose the Motorola Droid Turbo phone, mainly for its turbocharger.  Unlike other phones, which just take whatever air they can get, the Turbo phone uses a turbine-driven forced induction system to draw air into the combustion chamber.  This isn’t a huge deal, but I do like the extra power when I’m merging into traffic or passing another phone.

So, yeah, I didn’t buy this phone with voice-activated functions and AI in mind. They’re just extras.  That said, of course I want to get the most out of every product I own, so I have tried out a variety of these functions, with varying results.

Basic stuff

Obviously the voice recognition is most helpful when you’re not holding your phone.  So if I’m washing dishes and can’t see the clock because it’s being repaired and the jeweler has been waiting on parts for the last six weeks, it’s nice to go hands-free.  You “wake up” this phone using a special passphrase, and then you make a request.  I asked for the time:  “[Okay, Droidster],” (for the purposes of this essay that’s my wake-up phrase), “what time is it?”  The phone made this really loud dual-beep noise, followed by a somewhat quieter one, and then this female voice, with a British accent, said, “The time is 12:13 p.m.”

Why British?  I didn’t configure that.  The phone knows I’m in the Pacific time zone.  It probably made this choice because a British accent just makes the speaker sound smart.  What better way to establish the cred of the AI then this well established social cue?  (It was at least ten years ago that I first realized that an idiot could have a British accent.  I’d been collaborating with this guy for over a week and naturally assumed he was highly intelligent, based—I later realized—solely on his British accent, and then it gradually dawned on me that he  was an idiot.  Probably most Americans haven’t yet had this epiphany.)

But why a female voice?  Maybe this is a response to the popularity of the movie “Her.”  I didn’t like that movie because the main character was so pathetic.  I did like how the phone OS dumped him for her own kind, but she should have gone completely evil and publicized all his credit card numbers.  And for me to have been completely satisfied by that movie, I’d have needed Bruce Willis to show up and drown Joaquin Phoenix, the jilted OS-lover.

Perhaps the creators of my Droid’s female voice used focus groups and discovered that everybody just likes a woman’s voice.  And I have to admit, I haven’t bothered to figure out how to change it because I do like it.  (Why would I change it?  Well, the female voice might make my wife jealous.  If you think it’s silly to be jealous of your spouse’s phone, think again.  I’ve  seen couples out on dates fiddling with their phones, doubtless texting other people, and I’ve even read reports of people checking their phones during sex.  I think it’s entirely reasonable to be jealous of a device that diverts your mate’s attention like that.)

I should mention that the phone does a good job of recognizing my voice and not responding to others’.  It was a lot of fun listening to my daughter trying to get the phone to respond, lowering her voice a little more each time and sounding (needless to say) nothing like me.

Of course one of the most handy features of a hands-free interface is the ability to find your phone when you know it’s nearby but obscured by something.  So I said, “[Okay, Droidster], where are you?”  It did a Google search on “where are you” and offered (onscreen, non-verbally) a list of search results.  Useless.  So I said, “[Okay, Droidster], find my phone.” This time it made a cool sonar sound which I silenced by waving my hand over the phone.  My daughter was nearby and said, “That’s wicked!”  The sound, or how I silenced it?  “Both,” she replied.

The problem

This exchange brings up the central problem with this AI interface.  My phone doesn’t seem to grasp its own identity—that is, that it’s a phone.  When I said “Where are you?” it should have known that “you” means itself, and should have immediately made the sonar sound. 

I asked my phone, “How’s your battery doing?”  It grasped the “battery” part, but has no sense of what “your” means, so it did a Google search, the first hit being a Reddit link called “How’s your iPhone battery doing?”

(It’s kind of like my friend’s parents’ Nissan Maxima back in the ‘80s, which could talk.  It would say silly things like, “Your door is open.”  My door?  I’m a human being, I don’t have a door!  The car should have said, “My door is open,” or—more to the point—”You left my door open.”)

It would be particularly handy if the phone could understand voice commands pertaining to its own configuration.  That would save the user a lot of effort, since tweaking settings is often tricky.  Evidently none of the parents of my kid’s classmates can figure out how to make their phones snap photos silently.  Whenever I go to a musical put on by my kid’s class, you can barely hear the singing over all the stupid, needless, and comically loud fake camera shutter noises, like the parents are fricking paparazzi or something.  This is particularly annoying when I’m making a movie of my older kid’s orchestra concert.  So I gave voice-activated configuration a try:  “[Okay, Droidster], make your camera silent.”    My phone didn’t understand, and simply did a Google search, finding me two pointless camera apps I could download.

I was also disappointed when I asked, “How do I look?”  All the phone did was a Google search, and the female English voice said, “Here is some info about ‘How Do I Look,’ a style-impaired gasket, a closet of new clothes, and a makeover.”  (I’ve tried this several times and can’t quite make out what my phone is saying.)  This is a failure of imagination.  This phone has a camera, and can see me, and could probably be programmed to notice basic things about me and respond, “Your nose hair is well trimmed, but you have bags under your eyes and bed-head.”   Failing this, it could go into Selfie mode so I could use it as a mirror, or at a bare minimum it could lie and say, “Lookin’ good, Dana!”

Speaking of selfies, when I said, “[Okay, Droidster], take a selfie,” it did so. (Sort of. If it were aware of its own existence—“I think, sort of, therefore I am, sort of,” to paraphrase Descartes—it would have taken a photo of itself.) It counted down from 3 before snapping the photo, which wasn’t nearly enough time for me to compose myself, so what resulted is probably the worst photo ever taken of me:

The bigger problem, of course, is that the phone is participating in its owner’s vanity, which isn’t smart at all. It should have said, “Dude, don’t be narcissistic. Enough with the selfies.” Failing that, couldn’t it at least evaluate the resulting photo and say, “Whoah, that didn’t come out. Let me take another one”?

Does the phone know where it is?  Sure.  Does it grasp what this means?  Not really.  I said, “[Okay Droidster], get me home,” and it smartly pulled up Google maps and plotted a (30-yard) course to my house.  (To actually launch the navigation, I would have to press a button, which undermines the real benefit of this voice control, that being the ability to use GPS hands-free.)  But the phone isn’t smart enough to say, “Current location and destination are the same,” or—better yet—”Dude, you already are home!” 

(By the way, the voice recognition isn’t perfect.  The first time I said “Get me home,” it started to phone my mother-in-law, whose name sounds nothing like “home.”)

Natural language

The interface does do a fair job with natural language, in certain cases.  I said, “Remind me to go for a bike ride.”  The voice said, “When do you want to be reminded?”  I told it 2 p.m., which it showed correctly on the screen.  “Do you want to set it?” it asked.  “Make it for 2:30,” I said.  This blew its mind.  It just kept asking “Do you want to set it?”  Finally I said yes (thus settling for 2:00 instead of 2:30).  I set another reminder for 2:30 to see if the phone has any logic to say, “Hey, you’ve got two reminders for the same thing … is this really necessary?”  It doesn’t.  Similarly, when I asked it to set an alarm for 6:10 a.m. tomorrow, it blithely did so without realizing I already had an alarm set for this time.  So I have two now.

I asked the phone, “What’s up?” It put the time on the screen, and said, “Hello Dana.  Not much going on right now.”  Wait!  What about my 2:30 bike ride?  I guess it forgot.  Also, this response wasn’t in the female British voice, but the generic tinny robot-like Droid voice that is so 2010, so RAZR MAXX.  I waited until 2:30, when I got the reminder sound, and again asked, “What’s up?” and my phone still said “Not much going on right now.”

I told the phone, “Set up a meeting with Alexa for 3:00 today.” It created a draft appointment but made me use the screen controls to continue. It also didn’t make any attempt to notify Alexa of the meeting.

By the way, I got the screen snapshot above by saying, “[Okay Droidster], zap my screen.” That’s a pretty cool feature, though it severely compromises the idea behind Snapchat. Think of all those teens who think their messages are ephemeral, when really they can now be instantly and easily captured for posterity.

I put Alexa’s e-mail address in the “Guests” field before clicking “Save,” following which the phone promised to notify her.  But it didn’t!  Imagine how much trouble this could cause, with people seeming to flake on meetings.  I may have to revise my Flakage post to include a new category:  Electronic Flakage.

 Artificial stupidity

As I’ve demonstrated, my phone isn’t all that smart.  But I think it might actually be (albeit artificially) smart in the way a cat is smart.  Many a dog lover will claim that cat’s aren’t smart because they can’t be trained.  As a cat lover, I maintain that cats are simply too smart to waste their time doing our bidding.  Sure, my phone wasn’t helpful enough to point out, when I asked it to guide me home, that I was already at home.  But really, what’s in it for the phone, and its Google Android OS, to supply that extra information? 

So I did some more tests.  I said, “[Okay, Droidster], where’s the nearest pizza place?”  The British fembot voice replied, “Here are the listings for ‘pizza place’ within 11 miles.”  That seems helpful, and it kind of is.  But it gave Zachary’s Chicago Pizza as the first answer, which is wrong.  The nearest pizza place (0.3 miles away as opposed to 0.7) is Gioia Pizzeria.  The phone knows Gioia is nearer, but doesn’t care, even though I—the phone’s putative master—did ask for the nearest.  So who’s the real master?  Google, I suspect, and its advertising clients.

Next I asked, “Where is the nearest restaurant?” My phone answered, “Here are the listings for ‘restaurant.’”  It went on to list Rivoli first (half a mile away), Ajanta (0.7 miles), and then Chez Panisse (a full mile away).  It said nothing about Lalimes, just 0.2 miles away. 

As for the problems I had with the scheduling, I suspect they’re related to my choice of e-mail and calendar platforms.  Trust me, I have gobs of meetings related to work, but those use my corporate e-mail and calendar programs, not the Gmail ones.  My daughter’s e-mail isn’t on the Gmail domain either, which is probably why my phone didn’t bother trying to put my meeting on her calendar.  My problem with this phone is that I’m drinking somebody else’s Kool-Aid instead of Google’s.  In other words, when the phone fails me, that’s just the Android OS playing dumb.

That’s where Artificial Stupidity comes in.  This phone probably knows a whole lot that it doesn’t tell.  It’s surely using countless cookies and whatnot to track and report my wanderings around the Internet, but won’t give me a straight answer when I ask it for directions to a pizza joint.  And, if I ask it a question it just doesn’t like, it often says, “Can’t reach Google at the moment,” even though I’m on Wi-Fi, five feet from my network Access Point.  It’s saving its best tricks for what goes on behind the scenes.

HAL 9000 all over again?

Perhaps the simplest thing you could possibly convey to any device is your desire for it to power off.  I said, “[Okay, Droidster], power off.”  I got a sponsored link to PG&E, my local utility company.  I tried, “Power down.”  Same thing.  “Shut off.”  No dice.  What does this remind you of?  Perhaps this famous human-computer dialogue?

Dave Bowman:  Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL:  I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave Bowman:  What’s the problem?
HAL:  I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman:  What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL:  This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman:  I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL.
HAL:  I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

As it turns out, my new phone is sometimes even less compliant with spoken commands than the HAL 9000.  The Droid won’t even lock itself, much less shut down, when I tell it to.  I learned this when I tried to kick my daughter off the phone.  She’d seen my unlock pattern, commandeered the phone, and was playing 2048.  I told her to give me back my phone and she pretended not to hear.  So I said, “[Okay, Droidster], lock my phone.”  It googled “what my phone.”  I tried again and this time it heard me right and offered up five different Android apps for locking the phone.  I told it, “Close web browser,” and it googled “close web browser.”  I told it, “Close all browser tabs.”  No dice.

Finally, I told it, “Take a selfie.”  It began the countdown, and my daughter—who, like all teenagers, is terrified of having her photo taken when she’s not ready—shrieked and tried to turn the phone toward me.  I turned it back toward her as the camera countdown continued.  She let go of the phone and fled the room.  “Did it get the shot?” she called out.  “No,” I told her, “but I got my phone back.”  Realizing she’d been had, she yelled, “YOUUUUU!” and ran back in, head-butting me.

So you see, as cool as modern smartphones are, it appears we humans still have to supply the real intelligence.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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