The original note, as written at the time
MINIMALIST SMARTPHONE. A smartphone with no social media feature, no games and no music or other multimedia. A smartphone with only productive functionality such as: phone, SMS, writer, camera, settings, dictionary/encyclopedia, light mail.
Ongoing development
A smartphone with no social media, no games, no music, no multimedia. Only the productive functions: phone, SMS, writer, camera, settings, dictionary, light mail.
The list is the argument, because it is a list of things a person chooses deliberately rather than a list of things that are missing.
We talk about attention as though it were a moral failing, and then we carry a device engineered by thousands of the best-paid people alive to take it. A minimalist phone is not a stricter person. It is a different instrument, and the difference is that the default is finished rather than infinite.
What is interesting is the inclusion of the writer, the camera and the dictionary. This is not an ascetic device. It is a device for making things and looking things up, with the consumption machinery removed. That is a much more precise brief than “a dumb phone”, which is the thing that already exists and is bought by people who want to stop, rather than by people who want to work.
The commercial problem is honest: the features removed are the ones that generate revenue, so no manufacturer with a business model will make this. It will be a niche, made by somebody small, sold to people who know what they want.
The design problem is finer. A phone with no browser at all is unusable, because half of ordinary life is now a page. A phone with a browser is a phone with everything. So the honest version has a browser that is deliberately awkward — no tabs, no history, no bookmarks, one page at a time — which keeps the utility and removes the drift.
Not a phone for a better person. A phone for a person who has decided.