Jonathan Sumner Evans
Sumner Evans
Software Engineer at Automattic working on Beeper

The Need for a New Type of Phone

Written by Human, Not by AI

Currently, there are only two kinds of phones. Smartphones and dumb phones. I don’t think that these terms are descriptive enough. Take, for example, the iPhone versus the $14.99 flip phone you can get at Walmart. Obviously, the iPhone is a smartphone and the flip phone is a dumb phone. Now take a phone in the middle of the pack maybe one with a slide-out keyboard but no internet. Where does it fit? Does it qualify as a smart phone? Or is it a kinda-dumb smartphone? Well, my opinion is that that is a dumb phone. Where, then, does the little flip phone come in? Does it get put into the dumb phone category with the phone with the slide-out keyboard? No way! It is a much dumber phone. But that still doesn’t answer the question. Where does it get placed on the ladder of phone categories? Let me propose a new rung on the ladder. A very low rung… Introducing… The idiot phone. Yes, the idiot phone. With this new phone categorization, the problem of how to categorize a flip phone is solved.