(2023-06-05) On the perception of minimalism
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It just so happened that I'm into (cellular) phones as one of my main
hobbies. Not the touchscreen zombifiers but something that current folks 
call "dumbphones" or "featurephones", which mostly have physical keypads and 
non-touch interfaces. And I do have some ongoing researches about this 
topic, most of which are unfortunately in a frozen state, but now I want to 
talk about something else. Whenever I hear someone chooses a "minimalist 
phone" instead of a smartphone in 202x, it makes me cringe. No, reducing 
smartphone dependency is always good and I fully support that. The cringe 
comes from calling the replacement of your choice "minimalist". Especially 
if this replacement still has smartphone hardware inside and runs either 
KaiOS or a stripped-down Android version. But most people don't understand 
that even if we take a true featurephone with no camera/memory card/GPRS and 
with a monochrome display, like Nokia 1100 or 3310-2000, it still is far 
from minimalism despite being old and basic. And most phones in my own 
collection can be called old but not minimalist. Let me explain why.

You see, even the most basic phone today, with no camera or Bluetooth or
expandable memory or 3G/LTE etc, still has a lot of things that we take for 
granted but they are really optional with regards to the established GSM 
standard and NOT necessary for the phone to perform its main functions. 
Today's schoolboys might not know but not every GSM cellphone (not to even 
mention analogue standards like NMT or AMPS) even had a built-in clock in 
the early days. In some phones, like Motorola M3x88 series, the clock was a 
hidden option that you could only enable in the hidden test mode (and, 
unless you had a special cable and flashing box, activating this mode was 
another big story). Earlier phones didn't have any clock at all. Same for 
calculator. Interactive USSD queries? SIM-specific menus from your carrier? 
If your phone is from 1998 or earlier (like Nokia 5110), forget them. You 
won't have them. Tri-band? Dual-band? What are you talking about? Dual-band 
was a great feature that allowed M3x88 owners to feel superior to owners of 
5110 that only had GSM900, or, in case of 5130 (yes, the true 5130, not that 
colored pseudo-musical nonsense), only GSM1800. If we dive even deeper and 
look at the early GSM Nokias (and by that, I mean the models like 1611), 
we'll find out that non-Latin SMS support is also something very-very 
optional. And no, I'm not talking about sending, I'm talking about 
reception. Also, be ready to receive compound SMS messages as separate ones 
and to not be able to send more than 140 characters at all. And if that's 
not enough, early 1610 variants didn't have SMS sending support at all, only 
1610 Plus and 1611 had. And even earlier phones might drop SMS/USSD support 
altogether, along with call divert menus (why would you need them when you 
have standard GSM codes anyway...) How do you like such minimalism?

Still, even the earliest GSM phones (like Ericsson GH172 from 1992, that had
a _segmented_ LCD) had a basic set of functions that is inseparable from any 
handset to these days. Which are:

1) phonebook;
2) call log;
3) keyguard;
4) PIN code entry and configuration (although, just like call diverts, this
can be changed via standard codes);
5) network selection (manual and/or automatic);
6) sending DTMF tones during the call and automatically;
7) auto-redial (a great legacy from desktop phones - more on that later);
8) battery charge indicator;
9) signal level indicator;
10) volume control;
11) ringtone selection;
12) microphone mute;
13) screen language selection;
14) last call timer and total calls timer.

You might think this list is trivial to implement, but, believe it or not,
every single item of it was a separate task to solve back then. Obviously 
they were reusing some solutions developed for the previous (analogue) 
platforms, but, for instance, PIN entry and SIM-based phonebooks are 
something that needed to be researched from scratch. Even such simple things 
already involved so much work under the hood that I wouldn't dare to call 
_any_ GSM phone "minimalist". Something like AMPS or NMT was a totally 
different story. A story for another time.

--- Luxferre ---