Garbage (Phone) Time

What if phone was bad, on purpose?

I’m hearing all the cool kids on their tick tock are doing “no phone summer”, reading books and playing old portable videogame handhelds instead of scrolling. This is a worthy trend as they go, but not one that I intend to follow.

For one thing, if you ever see me at a bus stop with an ereader or a DS it’s very important that you realise that this is not cool, it’s weird and in a specifically uncool way—I have a reputation to maintain here. Secondly it’s extremely winter right now which makes the relaxing outside on the balcony¹ part of the equation quite difficult.

But the biggest problem with the idea of using my phone less is that I’ve recently (and arguably quite foolishly) increased the number of phones I’m carrying around. You see, a few months ago I decided that I needed a dedicated work phone. I don’t work in sales or on call, in which case my employer would (hopefully) comp me a phone and that would be that, but it’s still convenient to have access to Teams² and Outlook in certain situations without booting an entire laptop—at the same time though having these apps on my personal phone is not healthy and comes with unwanted software and notifications, hence the need for a separate device.

This presents a conundrum: how do I get a second phone without doubling the amount of Phone? I’m very aware that convenience is how we all got into this smartphone mess, so I had the idea to make it as inconvenient as possible. This dovetailed well with another priority, which was to avoid spending very much money on this if at all possible.

There are a few ways to go about buying a cheap, bad phone. I’d have loved to get a dumb phone, but that would have defeated the point—even KaiOS doesn’t seem to have a Teams client. A refurbished flagship phone of yesteryear might have been a good option, but I didn’t want to play the lottery on that. Instead I went with the cheapest,³ but new (as in unused), Android phone I could find.

The TCL 403 is an objectively terrible device here in the middle of the 2020s. It runs Android 12⁴, which officially hit EoL in the same month that I received it, and it’s SoC is apparently from 2018 when 2GB of RAM (some models seem to have only the one gigabyte!) went a lot further. It has a 480p screen⁵ and bezels for days, but unfortunately the screen isn’t physically small—you can just imagine the resulting dot pitch. It has a single rear camera that is a prime example of why the number of megapixels is no-longer used to imply quality. Worst of all, it charges via ye olde USB Micro-B. At least I still have a few of those cables lying around.

But it has 4G VoLTE (3G turns off here at the end of the year) and a headphone jack,⁶ and even a user-replaceable battery. It came with a clear case and a plastic screen protector, and I found no shortage of alternatives for those on AliExpress. With a working Google Play Store, letting me download those apps I bought it for, what else could I actually want?

That’s a very different question to asking what you could possibly want. If I had been subjected to this setup involuntarily it would be unbearable, and I strongly suspect that most readers would not find the funny side. For one thing Teams and Outlook take 10 seconds to load on a good day, and when the endpoint management software decides a couple of times a week to re-verify the device it’s time to put the whole thing down and come back later.

But personally I’m looking for every reason to put it down. I’m extremely vulnerable to the instinct that compels people to check if the news is different on a different screen, and so what I’m looking for is a pager that I can use only when needed. If said pager is slow and temperamental, well, so much the better. I’m no doctor, so for me if it was worth doing it was worth waiting.

I paid a hundred NZD for the phone—which is far too much for the actual hardware in 2025—but it came with a SIM card and enough credit to last for months so I’m not complaining from a financial perspective. Physically I don’t welcome an extra thing to cram into my handbag alongside my real phone,⁷ but it does fit.

It’s been months now, and I have to say this tomfoolery has worked out great. It works for what I need it to do, and I have no desire to use the thing otherwise. Charging is a little annoying but since I barely use the thing I only have to do it twice a week at worse. Overall this terrible phone is a huge success.

But I’m still going to try to use my real phone less too.

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1. My ‘balcony’ is the roof of the garage, but it kinda works.↩︎

2. As I’ve joked elsewhere, if Discord is Slack for gamers then MS Teams is Slack but Lotus Notes. Specifically IBM-era Lotus Notes—if you don’t know you don’t want to.↩︎

3. Carrier-locked, obviously.↩︎

4. I’m not sure if it’s Android Go Edition or not, it’s certainly the right specs. From my research, regular Android 12 became unsupported before I bought the device, but the Go version lasted a couple of extra weeks.↩︎

5. That is, 480x960. Are 1:2 screens common? I have no idea, I don’t buy a lot of phones.↩︎

6. And therefore an FM radio, which I feel should be compulsory.↩︎

7. …and my keys and my mask and my card wallet and my ereader and my DS… You get the idea, I have real space issues.↩︎