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My elderly mother got a feature phone and couldn't figure out how to use it. It was such a complicated muddle of changing on-screen menus and icons that you act

My elderly mother got a feature phone and couldn't figure out how to use it. It was such a complicated muddle of changing on-screen menus and icons that you activated with mystery buttons on the keypad. I had to first play around with it myself to learn how to make a call, then teach her. Somehow she activated the camera instead and couldn't get back to normal phone mode on her own. These things are pointless toxic waste. All those stupid features force you to give them your attention every time you want to call someone or even answer the damn phone. This is a dumb-phone that cost as much as a low-end smartphone so anyone buying it would be doing so because they don't want all those aggravating complications. I'm sick of machines constantly nagging for my attention. Shut up and get out of the way. I own you, not the other way round! Anyway, excuse me getting a bit carried away there :P Touched a nerve.

nilram 5y ago
My partner's mom's, age 96, was needing a new phone, so we got the latest "feature" phone from Lively (company formerly known as Jitterbug). On the new phone, the minimum number of keypresses to make a call to anyone in her phonebook was about 8. The minimum on the prior phone (which I know only by Jitterbug) was 2. Although she was an early adopter of word processing and email many years ago, she couldn't track what was going on with this new phone enough to use it. We found a direct replacement of the prior phone and have moved her back to that. > I'm sick of machines constantly nagging for my attention. Same. And in her case, she can manage far less attention than she used to. Tech companies don't accommodate for that.