Free Republic

Dumb phones may be falling out of fashion on a global scale, but it’s a different story in the U.S. Companies like HMD Global, the maker of Nokia phones, continue to sell millions of mobile devices similar to those used in the early 2000s. This includes what’s known as “feature phones” — traditional flip or slide phones that have additional features like GPS or a hotspot. “I think you can see it with certain Gen Z populations — they’re tired of the screens,” said Jose Briones, ... In the U.S., feature flip phone sales were up in 2022 for HMD...

Visitors to the Chicago zoo showing the 415lb Amare pictures and videos through the glass wall has made him dismissive to other male gorillas A teenage gorilla in a Chicago zoo has been getting too much screen time, according to zoo officials. Amare, a 415-pound gorilla at Chicago’s Lincoln Park zoo, has been staring a little too frequently at the screens of cellphones from visitors who show him pictures and videos through the glass wall – including selfies, family photos, pet videos and even footage of Amare himself. He has apparently become so distracted as a result that last week,...

In a time when various “developed world” intelligence agencies are filling up petabytes of hard disk space with domestic phone recordings and tracking their own citizens who – in the pursuit of a “liberal” agenda – have been escalated to a greater terrorist threat than actual foreign terrorists, some people have had enough and are throwing their smart phones into the trash and replacing them with “dumbphones” instead. One among them is seventeen-year-old Robin West, who according to the BBC is an anomaly among her peers: “she doesn’t have a smartphone.” Instead of scrolling through apps like TikTok and Instagram...