cdarwin, 16 days ago

It’s almost enough to make you stop doomscrolling:
dull devices are now cool.

The Boring Phone is a new, featureless flip phone that is feeding the growing appetites of younger people who want to ditch their smartphones in favour of a dumbphone.

The latest model is a collaboration between Heineken beer and the fashion retailer Bodega,
and caused a storm when it was unveiled this month at Milan design week,
the place where trends are anointed by the world’s designers.

The Boring Phone is part of a new dumbphone boom,
built on the suspicion of gen Z towards the data- and attention-harvesting technologies they have grown up with.
That suspicion has fuelled reinventions of retro cultural artefacts
– a trend known as #Newtro
– and seen in the revival of vinyl records, cassettes,fanzines, 8-bit video games and old-fashioned mobile phones.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/the-boring-phone-stressed-out-gen-z-ditch-smartphones-for-dumbphones?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other