[lmm]

The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.

[mrob]

I use a 6 year old phone. It has a third party extra thick battery and a microSD card slot. It does the core functions of a phone just as well as a modern one (voice call, SMS, clock, calculator, flashlight, music player). The camera is worse, but if I cared about quality I'd use a standalone camera. As for apps/Internet, it's roughly the same as modern phones: a whole lot of barely usable garbage only suitable for emergency use when you don't have access to a desktop. It seems to me that any modern phone would be a downgrade.

[Drakim]

I saw a funny cloud today, I took a picture of it. I usually don't carry an extra standalone camera with me all day just for moments like that.

I can also google up information about light-bulbs when I'm standing at the store wondering if I should get X or Y. Or if some product doesn't specify if it's gluten free or not and the ingredients look a little iffy.

There are plenty of tiny improvements. It doesn't revolutionize my life, but having my old Nokia would definitely be a downgrade.

[olavgg]

A 6 year old phone is still capable of doing that I think Samsung Galaxy was at version 3 or 4 around 2012, Nokia was big before 2007, 11 years ago.

[Drakim]

If the case being made is just that we don't need the absolutely latest smartphone, I'm totally onboard.

But there is also a lot of offhand grumpiness about how we don't need all this technology, which I disagree with. Technology improves our lives, but it's not always apparent right away.

[SiempreViernes]

Five years ago I had a phone with buttons and rarely had to stop the impulse of trowing it into a wall because google kept installing updates to apps I don't want and can't do more than factory reset.

Sure, I didn't have a fancy app to look at the timetable for the bus, but there was a wap-page I could use and frankly the apps are about as frustrating but now because touch interactions so often go wrong without real buttons.

And I use both vim and ssh daily, rarely wishing I had an new app to replace them with.

[Yetanfou]

Swap out the stock distribution - I'm assuming Android here - for something like AOSP, leave off the Google-specific bits (i.e. do not install 'gapps' or anything which depends on it, install the mock-google-bits instead if you want to run something which depends on Google play services. Use F-Droid instead of the Google play store. Voila, a phone which does not do silly updates behind your back, does not install apps you do not want and which should last for years and years - mine is about 7.5 years old now.