Smartphones are great. But at the same time, they bring along a lot of challenges to us as users. We have become always available. Our work-life balance is compromised. Even if industry stalwarts like Mr. Narayan Murthy don’t believe in work-life balance, doctors and wellbeing experts strongly advocate for it. It’s very important that we refresh the counters to bring new perspectives, energy, thoughts and motivations to workstations. This can only happen if we get a chance to go back into our space, a space that’s completely in our command and control, where we decide what we want to do with time. A complete unwinding time!
The means of unwinding could be different for different people. Some might want to socialize with friends at clubs in the evening, some might want to relax with family, and some might just want to retire in a quiet corner in their homes reading a book, watching TV or doing some meditation.
We all try to unwind even now. But what can completely disturb and disrupt this is a smartphone. There are messages, mail, notifications that keep on coming and we unknowingly get engaged, sometimes for hours. We might have planned something for the evening, and it’s hijacked by the smartphone. The smartphone decides what we are going to do that evening. Be it an office update, a social network update or any other update of our interest area, it can hit our smartphone at any hour of the clock. This is expected and routine behaviour of communications. Obviously, everyone will communicate at their own convenient time or time zone. It never means we must respond there and then. We can and should ideally respond at our allocated time. But that doesn’t happen. We feel let’s quickly circle back and close the loop, when then could lead to something else and thus we get trapped into this vicious circle of messages, mails and notifications. This is beyond us sometimes getting trapped into scrolling screens and consuming content on many popular social media platforms.
So why don’t we simply switch off our smartphones? There are perhaps two reasons to it. One is of course what we call FOMO, and it can’t be solved unless one gets away with a sort of anxiety of knowing what’s happening around me and what am I missing? With the passage of time, this too I believe can be overcome and as the laws of diminishing returns apply our excitement of knowing first goes down. The other reason is more rational and use case driven. We still want to keep a window of communication open for our nears and dears, our family, who can call you anytime. For instance, if I am travelling, I keep my phone just by my side so that my wife and children can reach me out at any hour of the day. Similarly, I want my mother to be able to call me anytime if she wants to, as she lives back in my hometown. For this reason, I keep my smartphone on and get lazy to switch off the mobile data or Wi-Fi. Even if I may switch off the data, the screen still tempts me to keep checking one or the other thing. If there is nothing new, it could just be scrolling old pics and videos stored in my phone.
This is where I feel a paired featurephone would make sense and has a use case to solve. Essentially what I would like is to have an eSim in my smartphone, which I already have and a physical sim of the same number in my featurephone. It is always difficult to manage two different numbers, and now with the rising tariffs, it’s becoming costly too. There are many people, especially who are in essential services like doctors, who keep two numbers and share one of them with their close circle only, who can reach out to them on it at any time. If, like smartphone-smartwatch pairing, there is smartphone-featurephone pairing available with same number, it could address this use case.
We could simply disconnect from the digital world, pause notifications, messages and mail without being unavailable to those who may want to reach out to us in case of any emergency or urgency. We could switch off the smartphone, say after 8pm and keep our featurephone available for calls. For any SOS, there is anyways SMS which we will still be receiving. Some featurephones are also now allowing UPI payments. So, we don’t need to turn on our smartphone to make any payment during those hours. For instance, deciding to go on a late-night walk with the spouse and impromptu deciding to have a paan (beetle leaf).
Featurephones are not dead yet. They still have a relevance, though diminishing. If we can pair it with a smartphone, I see a reason where many consumers like me won’t mind buying it as an additional phone makes me ‘de-digital’ but does not disconnect me. It also would give me greater control of my time and strike a healthy work-life balance. Today, work-life balance is not only about extra work or working beyond office hours, it’s also about private-public time.
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