Exploring Alternatives to Limit Smartphone Screen Time

Daily screen time struggles reveal the challenge of balancing phone use and self-control.

### Exploring Alternatives to Smartphones: A Review of Minimalist Devices
* 📱 Marquez shares his average screen time for the past week, revealing a troubling trend with **7 hours and 11 minutes of screen time** yesterday alone.
* 💔 He acknowledges the challenge of **reducing phone usage**, despite wanting to retain the **positive aspects of smartphones**, and mentions various devices aimed at **minimizing screen time**.
* 📏 The Palm Phone, a tiny device revived by former Samsung engineers, struggles to gain traction due to its **limited features** and the temptation to **install the same apps as on a regular phone**.
* 📸 While the camera quality is decent, it lacks nighttime functionality, and the phone's cuteness doesn't prevent users from **downloading distracting apps**.
* 📅 The Light Phone II is discussed as a minimalist option, but its **lack of features like a camera and limited storage** make it frustrating for users accustomed to **fully functional smartphones**.
* 🚗 Navigational issues with the Light Phone II highlight its shortcomings, particularly for those reliant on **apps like Google Maps**, which are **essential for daily use**.
* 📚 The Boox Palma, an e-reader that functions like an Android device, offers a **unique experience** but lacks calling capabilities, making it more of a **companion** than a standalone phone.
* 🔍 Overall, the discussion emphasizes the desire for a "**Mega dumb phone**" that combines the best features of these devices while addressing the common pitfalls of **excessive smartphone use**.

Marquez, what is your daily screen time? My average for last week is 2 hours and 45 minutes, 2 hours 53 minutes, 3 hours 40 minutes, 1 hour 18 minutes, 4 hours 52 minutes. Let's see, let's see. YouTube Studio load is 3 hours. It depends on if I fell asleep to YouTube or not, and 2 hours as well, so 4 hours 45 minutes. My screen time yesterday was 7 hours and 11 minutes. I have a problem. We're on our phones, they're too accessible. We want to get rid of them, but not entirely. We want to keep the good things from the phones, and there's plenty of devices that can help us get off our phones. Whether they work is yet to be seen. Look at it, it's so little. Look at it next to my watch, like it's almost the same freaking size, and your phone is already tiny. This is a small iPhone, but this is like unbelievably small. So, this is the Palm Phone. This was

an interesting idea. Palm, if you're unaware, was this PDA company that was extremely popular before smartphones were really a thing. And then some X Samsung engineers in 2018 decided to buy the brand name because they kind of figured that if they did that, a lot of people who really loved their palms back in the day would probably buy the Palm Phone. Were they right? No. Yeah, it was $300, and you had to have a data plan, and it was your second phone. You have to figure out like when am I going to bring this with me versus when I'm going to bring my other phone with me, and you have to specifically figure out like what limiting features you want to have. The problem with this phone, you can install almost anything on it, and that's my problem is I wanted to use apps L, but I could install all the exact same apps on this, and you couldn't help yourself. Well, how could you? It's so cute. It's so small. It's pretty cute picture playing like tiny Angry Birds. It's a

cool idea. I still think you could just have self-control and not put social media apps on your phone. But yeah, what's to stop you from installing Instagram on this? Nothing cool. What's the camera like? It's actually pretty decent. The contrast, I feel like, is really where it's struggling with dynamic range. It does not work at night, like literally it could not see at night. Yeah, that's not a picture, but overall pretty decent. Those are some good borbo picks. Also, Steph Curry is like the brand ambassador of this and is heavily invested in it. They had a necklace that you could wear where it would like dangle around your neck, and he used to walk to Warriors games with it dangling on his neck. Dope. Nope. Dope. What's next? What in the hell is even that? That's amazing. Wait, did we design this or was this like a template somewhere? We made Alex design. Yo, shout out to Alex. If you want, link in the description. You could print this out.

yourself so you can stop using your phone. Yeah, yo, I kind of like this. Wait, Samsung should make this. Mak, it doesn't open well. The real question is, would this... Do you think this would be enough to limit your screen time? 'Cause I know that I... I would simply just take this off and open it. I don't think I would take it off. That said, this would not limit my screen time. I'd be... I'd be apping my way through. It's the perfect way when you're eating lunch to, like, set it up to watch YouTube. You can prop up YouTube. I do this at home, but I literally put my phone against, like, my cup, and then I watch it on my kitchen table. See, that's not bad. It's pretty annoying, although it would be annoying if you're trying to read the message, like, if people are texting. It's only worse because this thing is on it. Like, you could just keep it close. Joe, NOP, nope, dope. Okay, this is an iPhone. There's nothing dumb about this. Wait, just wait. Ooh, hey, okay, what is

this they're are they widgets and you just set like the text size to super high. Okay, I'm assuming there's like guides on how to do this online. If you go to the other screen, there's an app called blank. You'll see how to actually configure it. Oh, okay. How much do they try to charge for this? You can pay month $4 a month or a lifetime fee of $23. It's just a widget. You're paying $24 for a widget. And also, like, it's no fun. You don't... We're not using our phones too much because they're too fun. We're using them too much because they put worms in our brains. Or a big thing that I was dealing with during this experiment was all of my accounts have like two-factor on them and stuff. So I need my MFA codes and whatnot in an app. So at least this, you'll still have the things you need. But the first instinct, your first look at the phone isn't, Hey, let me like click something that I'm not trying to do.

Right now, totally, we should have put like hardcore child locks on every dude. I could bypass this immediately. I wouldn't use this. Yeah, I don't think I could. I need more self-restraint. If the goal for me is to limit screen time, I don't think this is going to do anything. This is just like a quick access, like I need to open this app right now. Dope, dope, nope, nope. So Adam and I both have a very detailed history with the Light phone too. We've been trying to make a video about this phone, like switching to it for x amount of days, years, for years. Did you get to use this at all over the weekend? I used it a little bit. Mhm. It's really frustrating. It is really frustrating, and it's not frustrating because of the ink. Like, I love ink. Yeah, that's the cool part. Yeah, the music is a big problem though. Yeah, 1 gigabyte of internal memory is crazy. Yes. Yeah, that's wild. It's like, it's basically unusable.

for music. Like, you can put, I don't know, a running playlist on there. Maybe like, that's the only thing I could think of, like a couple songs to get you going on your run, so you can leave your phone at home. Yeah, but that's about it. Yeah, someone on the verge, she wrote a really great article about using this for a full year. A year. A year. And she had a better time with it than other people I had heard. For me, I feel like the deal breaker is the camera, or the lack of a camera, really. Let's say I'm on a first date, you know, and I think I'm about to impress someone with my super sweet Light phone. Like, I'm disconnected, babe. I'm like, I'm free. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have control over me, you know? And then I get there and the menu's on a QR code. Oh, you're screwed then. I look like a big dummy. Yeah, I did hear that the directions got a lot better recently, so I used it yesterday. I don't have a SIM card in it, so I used

Wi-Fi here. I got the directions, and then when I was driving out of the parking lot, it went into offline mode, and it actually navigated me to Costco perfectly fine with the voice. Looking at it on the map was completely useless because it's refreshing out of time, and it's like not really working. And then last night, so I'm driving from Brooklyn all the way uptown in New York City, and I tried to do it again, and it just completely failed. Oh really, like it did not work at all, but I think that was because there were so many things happening quickly, and it was in offline mode, so all of that, like there was just that too much of a delay for me to react in time before missing turns. I am a big Google Maps gal, so this might be a deal breaker for me if I can't fairly search something at any given moment to see where it pinpoint the exact location. Yeah, it's kind of useless. Like I don't give a about calendars. Like I don't use a calendar. Are you serious? Where's

YouTube. There's no YouTube on here. You don't use a calendar. What do I need a calendar for? Everything. What would you add to the Light phone 3 besides USBC? I'd say USBC, more storage, more storage, crappy camera, a higher refresh rate. I'm not see. I'm not even. Well, no, I am a little mad at the ref. A little because typing on this was. Typing is hard, but I guess that's kind of the point though. I don't want this to be a fully usable Super E used phone. Yeah, but if you are text people. Text. Nope. Nope. Nope. So I've been dailying not this one. I've been dailying mine. This. This is the books Palma. Fairly new e-reader. You wouldn't think because it looks like a smartphone. Yeah, you know, you can use it as a Kindle, but the cool thing about the books Palma is that you can also do any other Android-based things. Yeah, it looks just like an Android phone. Try the camera. Oh my God. I don't know if this is going to show up.

let's see if we can take a video of Mariah. All right, so how much is this? Uh, I think this is $280. Okay, which is like not bad. Yeah, that's really good. That's a very entry-level Android phone, right? It's obviously not going to be fast. It's like a pretty decent, like the fact that that is polarizing a bunch of uh ink and moving it around on the screen that rapidly is crazy. Wow. I would 100% watch something like this. I could see why this would be annoying after a while, but for 280. So the thing about the boooks Palama is that it is not actually a phone. Yeah. Oh, so you can't like make phone calls. No, but if it's just an Android device, can I like download Signal and WhatsApp and tell? Yeah, I'm an iPhone guy. Everyone knows this about me at this point. I feel like I set up an Air Message server on one of the Mac studios in the back of the office that gets all my air messages and then forwards them. So I have full

iMessage on this device. I can react. I can send pictures. But okay question would this stop you from using your phone at all. I don't know. I think I'd use it for different things. I'd use it for things that Inc is more geared towards right. Yeah like watching a YouTube video is going to be a little Annoying definitely wouldn't watch like Tik Tok on this. No um it did exactly what it was supposed to do where I'd pull out my phone get done the task that had entered my brain and put it back in my pocket. This thing is an actual joy to use as someone who used it as their phone for 3 days. I was like out with a bunch of people and I would take a picture of them with the phone and they would ask me like please take pictures of me literally all night. My favorite part about this like dinky camera is that it's SDR only. It will only do one exposure per click so you do not get multiple exposure High dynamic range it.

doesn't look like a phone; it looks like a camera. They're like these super dope black and white pictures. You shouldn't use this as a phone unless you're like me and you are incredibly patient and have like literally 3 or 4 days to get it working. And if you go on Reddit and you look at this thing, the books Palma, you'll see tons of people asking for the exact same thing, cellular books Palma. So, I really, really wish that books would actually make an Android smartphone. But basically, it needs to be connected to Wi-Fi. Yeah, okay. Even after saying all this, I don't know if I would daily this. Well, hold up now. I don't know if I would daily it if it was a standalone device. I think I like it as a phone companion. Interesting because there are certain things that are just better on my iPhone. I think you're just a two-phone person. Don't be scared, you can be a two-phone person. I felt like Michael Fiser all weekend. Do dop nope. If we took

different parts of all of these dumb phones and made one Mega dumb phone. Yeah, it would be perfect, like the size of the Z flip, with the screen of this, with stuff from the simplicity of the Palm phone, like App Hub. Maybe one day there will be a perfect device. All right, well, this has been fun, much fun. We got some other interesting videos on the studio channel. I just did a video with Marquez where we went over and talked about some phones that got canceled and why they got canceled. That was a fun trip down memory lane. Yeah, if you want to check out other videos we did recently about other weird technology, you should check out my cooking video from last week. Absolutely, it's a banger.

We Switched to Dumb(ish)phones So You Won't Have To

Behind-the-scenes content, event reactions, challenges, and more from the MKBHD Studio!

The Studio

Struggling with Screen Time and the Palm Phone

The speaker's average screen time last week was around 3 hours, with a peak of 7 hours and 11 minutes yesterday.

The Palm Phone, a small device aimed at reducing screen time, struggled to gain popularity despite its cute design and limiting features.

The phone's ability to install the same apps as a regular phone undermined its purpose, and it had a decent camera but struggled with low light.

The discussion revolves around a device designed to limit screen time, but its effectiveness is questioned.

The conversation explores various methods of using a phone to watch videos and manage tasks, highlighting the struggle with self-restraint.

The Light Phone's frustrating experience, particularly its limited memory and music capabilities, is also mentioned.

The Light Phone offers a running playlist feature but lacks a camera, which can be a deal breaker for some.

Its navigation and directions have improved, but the offline mode can cause delays and missed turns.

The phone's limited features, such as no calendar or YouTube, may not suit everyone's needs, and typing can be challenging.

The Boooks Palama is an entry-level Android device priced at $280, but it doesn't make phone calls.

It offers the option to download messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp, and the user has set up an Air Message server for full iMessage functionality.

The device is designed for short tasks and has a unique camera that only offers one exposure per click, making it a joy to use for taking pictures.

The device in question resembles a camera more than a phone, with its black and white pictures.

It requires patience and Wi-Fi to function, leading to a desire for a standalone Android smartphone.

The speaker enjoys using it as a phone companion, suggesting a possible future for a perfect "Mega dumb phone" by combining features from various devices.