
I wanted to punish my daughter with a no-frills phone but it didn't go to plan - adrian_mrd
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-04/punishment-phone-teenager-did-not-go-to-plan/11371136
======
DoreenMichele
This is intended to be humor. Don't take it too literally.

 _eating-uncooked-instant-noodles-straight-from-the-packet_

My sons learned that from me. I began doing it during my second pregnancy when
even saltine crackers were not plain enough for my level of nausea.

Yes, it's mind bogglingly messy.

~~~
silencio
this is a very popular south korean snack!

[https://www.theramenrater.com/tag/ppushu-
ppushu/](https://www.theramenrater.com/tag/ppushu-ppushu/)

~~~
j79
Half Korean.

I thought I figured out some amazing snack when I started eating ramen
straight out of the pack. My brother and I would mix it with microwave popcorn
(two unhealthy snacks cancel each other out, right?)

So it came as a shock when my cousin from Korea came to visit and wasn't
impressed with our ramen snacks.

"Doesn't everyone do this?"

Turned out my Half-Korean friends were doing the same thing (we were all Army
brats). They were equally surprised to find others doing it.

~~~
meruru
I've seen characters do this in anime, though it's usually presented as
cluelessness.

------
Mo3
I've used a burner phone exclusively for ~6 months because of lack of
financial funds. I loved that thing. Crystal clear calls, and while my fiancee
had to recharge her smartphone every night I almost got to 2 weeks without
charging and almost forgot that you actually have to charge it. It's a certain
feeling of freedom. Unfortunately they don't run Slack so I just got an old
S4, bought a huge aftermarket battery for it and optimized the kernel for
energy saving and now I can still go 4-5 days in standby. Battery life is like
drugs.

~~~
tsukikage
I was the last of my circle to switch to a smartphone; I only made the leap
about a year ago - the old dumb phone finally died, and when I looked online
for a replacement all I could see was senior phones. I decided I wasn't ready
for that yet - so marketing works I guess - so bought the smallest smart phone
I could find (a Unihertz Jelly, fwiw).

I have to say, I'm not impressed.

* battery life down from two weeks to two days on standby. People assure me it's not just my choice of model, this is the new normal and I should just get into a habit of charging it every night.

* generating dial tones during a call, as call tree systems generally require, is super awkward: you have to slide an unlock slider, then tap an icon to bring up the keypad, then dial the digit you want - all while looking at the screen, because unlike a real dial pad you cannot do this by feel - before the call tree prompt times out. Makes you feel like James Bond trying to defuse a bomb.

* texting is awkward: instead of generating text with nine tactile buttons, you swipe around a drawing qwerty keyboard twice the size of your thumb in total.

* I can't run the blackberry apps for connectivity to work because the Android version is incompatible, so it's no use as a smartphone for software reasons

* The UI generally feels like an unfinished intern project: the phone takes ages to boot, apps are slow to open and crash often, some settings do not survive a power cycle, etc etc. Having worked with many Android devices in a previous job, I'm pretty convinced this is not actually down to my choice of phone model; they're all flaky and people are just used to it. iOS devices are noticeably better in this regard, but suffer from other problems (the worst of which is Apple's disregard for third party software - every OS update breaks something, and major ones break most things, so every year or two all the actually smart parts of the smartphone stop working, you lose whatever you had stored in them and have to switch to new ones).

* The device is too small to comfortably read or browse internet on except in an emergency

Some of that is on me for picking a tiny phone, but the bigger devices aren't
really much better until they get too big for a jeans pocket, and fitting into
my pocket really _is_ a hard requirement for a device whose primary purpose is
something I carry on me all the time to stay in touch with people. Like any
self-respecting techie I have a tablet for reading/web browsing on a decent
screen, and a laptop for when I want a real computer, so the flaky unreliable
value-add does not seem to justify the broken core functionality of a mobile
phone.

I have now settled down into a working relationship of mutual hatred with the
device, but I do miss the old phone that was just a phone. Maybe it is time to
declare myself a senior after all.

~~~
iamnotacrook
"battery life down from two weeks to two days on standby. People assure me
it's not just my choice of model"

It's your choice of phone. I have a cheap Samsung phone for work and I don't
touch it for a week at a time and it's still charged. I suspect I could get it
to last longer if I disabled some of the google syncing (assistant type stuff,
checking for updates etc) but it's not my phone and i'm only on support for a
week at a time.

------
aapjaap
This reminds me of my kids responding to my gaming ban by playing space vs
backspace in the windows login prompt

~~~
m463
Is that like being without quarters, but figuring out which arcade games
actually DO something on the attract screen when you move the controls?

------
nabdab
Back when the Motorola razer was the most popular mobile phone on the market,
my sisters boyfriend had the sweetest tiny little flash drive sized dumb phone
that I still think would be awesome to own every time I go on vacation and
really want to leave reddit/Facebook/Snapchat and even hackernews at home
without loosing the ability to call emergency services or fellow travelers
when needs arise. Sadly that market is nowhere near attractive enough these
days for anyone to care.

~~~
blackflame7000
Get an Apple Watch, it has cellular

~~~
mehrdadn
How long does the battery last?

~~~
p2t2p
On cellular, without exercise tracking it’ll last for about 10 to 12 hours
without a phone, provided it is fully charged in the beginning.

That’s my anecdotal experience

------
waynecochran
I settled on a cheap iPhone from Walmart for son which is almost totally
locked down. He can call, text, listen to music. Not much else. As my child
counselor told me "you are either the jerk or the sucker" \-- I choose to be a
jerk.

------
dysoco
I would like to try a dumbphone for a while but no one here uses phone calls
and SMS anymore, they have all shifted to Whatsapp and sometimes Instagram, so
that's a bummer.

~~~
thefounder
I think people use SMS and regular phone calls if they can't find you on
whatsapp. Fortunately all have the "Phone" and SMS app already installed.

~~~
IshKebab
That situation pretty much doesn't happen, at least in the UK. Except people
over 70, _everyone_ has WhatsApp.

~~~
mrec
Sweeping generalization is sweeping. Not even 50 here.

~~~
noir_lord
39, never used WhatsApp.

~~~
londons_explore
You wouldn't get a message from me.

I no longer get any minutes or texts with my mobile plan - data only is half
the price, and I've never met anyone without WhatsApp.

------
russellbeattie
I once punished my then-seventh-grader by locking all the apps on his iPhone
for a week with a passcode. A few days later he forgets he's been punished and
sends a text in front of me. "Hey! I thought I locked that down!" Turns out he
found the instructions online to backup his phone and change the passcode.

It took a bit of effort and technical understanding, and since I didn't even
know it was possible, let alone that easy, he didn't get in trouble. (Though I
told him if he did it again, he'd be in Serious Trouble, which is the top
level of trouble above big and major).

I'm a geek - if you can out-tech me, you win.

------
shurcooL
One party trick some people miss about me is that for a number of years I
carried around an iPad mini (with cellular) in my front jeans pocket. It was
my primary and only mobile device. It was somewhat more inconvenient than a
smaller phone, but not by as much as one would expect it to be. Having its
bigger screen was an advantage in many situations though.

I downsized to a large phone a year ago (partly because Apple neglected the
iPad mini and I gave up waiting for a better version to come out).

~~~
dgzl
What was the party trick?

~~~
nefitty
My main device used to be a cell-enabled Galaxy tablet. I would make calls
over cell internet with Google Hangouts. It's big but it fit in my back pocket
so I loved to just randomly pull it out and pretend I was taking a call.
People who hadn't seen it before we're usually astonished, "Holy shit dude,
that's a huge phone!"

I guess not everybody had seen a tablet at that time, circa 2013 or so, and it
worked almost every time. That was my party trick.

------
mcv
That sense of humour certainly runs in the family.

Also, teaching your kids about radio is a nice bonus.

------
Luke-Jr
Doesn't he know there are parental control apps?

(Although my 10 year old figured out how to bypass those in a matter of days
each time I closed the previous bypass-hole... and that was using a rooted OS
I could SSH into. So maybe not so effective.)

~~~
ativzzz
Using parental controls is a great way to get kids to become hackers and learn
to break said parental controls.

~~~
namibj
It made me change to linux. I'm glad for it.

------
tannhaeuser
Is "burner phone" Aussie slang or something? Anyway, I like it :)

~~~
DonHopkins
If you've never heard "burner phone" before, you probably haven't watched
Breaking Bad, which was an American cultural touch-stone she mentioned, and an
excellent show you'll likely enjoy (and I envy you being able to binge watch
it now, instead of waiting week after week for the next episode):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad)

And then there's the "Breaking Phones" spin-off we really all wanted to see:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNzS66iRcjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNzS66iRcjw)

The actual "Breaking Bad" spin-off "Better Call Saul" has a whole multi-
episode sub-plot about burner phones:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wXeYOls7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wXeYOls7o)

You can see how cool that burner phone must have made her daughter feel!

~~~
coldtea
Not just Breaking bad. It's a very common term in all kinds of
mafia/heist/drug dealing/espionage/etc stories, long before Breaking Bad.

~~~
DonHopkins
Yes, but she wrote in the article "It's my daughter who's breaking bad," not
"It's my daughter who's like all kinds of mafia/heist/drug
dealing/espionage/etc stories". I was referring to that specific cultural
reference in the article.

------
pkaye
I honestly wouldn't mind a minimal feature super lightweight long battery life
cell phone most of the time. Basically phone calls and SMS.

~~~
tomxor
They never stopped making them, they got better and better in terms of battery
and weight. But you are not very likely to find them in a brick n mortar shop
(at least not good ones), they only want to sell smart phones because that's
where the money is. Shop online and there is plenty of choice... just don't
cheap out on the £10-20 phones because they will really piss you off with bad
UX, they might do mainly calls and text but you will be surprised how bad they
can make that experience.

I've got a £50 dumb nokia phone, it's lighter than any smartphone and last for
1-2 weeks on battery (it's about 5 years old), impossible to break, i never
have to think about it or worry about it, it doesn't distract me until someone
really needs to communicate with me... I love it, but then I never liked smart
phones.

~~~
war1025
Are there any that work with Verizon? I'm still using a phone that I got in
2011 because from what I can tell none of the feature phones work on Verizon
towers.

~~~
Consultant32452
Look for their prepaid phone offerings. There's some feature phones in that
line up, and it'll work with any plan.

On Amazon, search by carrier, sort by lowest price. Some are low end Android,
but some are feature phones. In my experience really low end android phones
have such little storage they might as well be feature phones. You could only
get 1-2 apps on max if you tried.

~~~
rootusrootus
Because I was curious (and I am a Verizon customer), I took a look. Verizon
Prepaid has exactly one feature phone available now:
[https://www.zteusa.com/cymbal-lte](https://www.zteusa.com/cymbal-lte)

Amazon lists at least one more but look at the fine print, if it's a 3G model
it can't be activated after the end of 2018.

~~~
tomxor
Can you not just buy a phone separately from your network provider?

In the UK i can just buy any unlocked phone I want online and stick my sim
card in it, the networks let you use whatever you want. My current phone is
only 3g but this has worked everywhere I have traveled so far, Europe, Asia,
Mexico, but not tried US.

~~~
Consultant32452
Yes, you can buy the phone separately from the provider. The issue is if you
want to be able to access all the frequencies the network provider uses. If
you get a phone that doesn't cover all the relevant frequencies, you will have
degraded service.

------
kccqzy
You know iPhone has amazing MDM controls. Just download Apple Configurator and
lock it down. You don't need a burner phone.

------
jaimex2
FZ One is a really good phone for this.

Parental controls are baked into the OS network stack with a locked
bootloader.

------
sys_64738
Kids are smarter than us though!

------
johnchristopher
Hey, that was fun :-).

------
znpy
Woah, who would have guessed? Kids are resourceful and can adapt?? Go figure.
/s

------
Theodores
Has anyone tried the user interface of a burner phone?

Recently I tried exchanging numbers with a friend who has a burner phone - a
replacement for a lost phone.

Yes, good luck with dialling a number or storing a number in the contacts.
Even sending a text is a trial of user experience, an intelligence test akin
to solving a Rubik's Cube.

So it is good to see that a 12 year old can work out some of these functions.
I completely failed to exchange phone contact numbers with my friend, with ten
minutes of trying.

~~~
lechienquipete
> good luck with dialling a number

You literally unlock the phone, type the number and press the call button.

