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Do you guys wear cargo pants to carry all these extra devices or are belt clips coming back into style? If I could get away with carrying a tiny device again i

Do you guys wear cargo pants to carry all these extra devices or are belt clips coming back into style? If I could get away with carrying a tiny device again instead of lugging around a brick I would, but the world has made it as inconvenient as possible not to. A BlackBerry from 15 years ago weighed just over 100g and did 80% of what your modern-day pocket computer can.

squibonpig 9mo ago
I mean, did it do 80% of the stuff? Devices have changed a lot.
- schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
  It did, and some of the things it was more effective at. I remember BlackBerry OS 4.x (?) had a built-in password manager app and this was in the mid-2000s. By comparison this was added to iOS 18 in 2024. What it wasn't good at was things like games and toxic consumer rich media bullshit. The industry saw dollar signs with iOS and Android and never wrote apps for the ecosystem. Remember the days when Instagram was iOS-only? But here we are, resigned to typing on glass for the rest of our lives because some hippie burnout thought it was a good idea.
  - tabiv 9mo ago
    You may be intetested in this, if you haven't seen it already. https://crackberry.com/clicks-communicator https://crackberry.com/clicks-communicator
- grishka 9mo ago
  I've never used a Blackberry but it was much more efficient for me to input text (an essential task for a communication device!) on non-iPhone-style phones with physical buttons.
  - danparsonson 9mo ago
    Nothing useful to add except, god I miss my Bold 9700. Every time I slip on this stupid touchscreen keyboard and make a stupid typo on this stupid phone I howl inwardly and wish pain and endless torment upon everyone who took us down this path away from light and goodness. Grumble grumble
    - grishka 9mo ago
      The fun part for me is that an old dumb phone could replace, like, 50% of my smartphone usage, if I could use Telegram on it. We even still have 2G networks with no plans to shut them down. So, a J2ME Telegram client has been on my list of potential future projects for quite some time.
emporas 9mo ago
When a bank eventually requires a more recent phone to work, they will carry three phones, one for that one bank, one more for the rest of the banks, and a personal one. Then they might move somewhere else with different banks and different hardware requirements, they will carry 5 phones.

squibonpig 9mo ago

I mean, did it do 80% of the stuff? Devices have changed a lot.

schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
It did, and some of the things it was more effective at. I remember BlackBerry OS 4.x (?) had a built-in password manager app and this was in the mid-2000s. By comparison this was added to iOS 18 in 2024. What it wasn't good at was things like games and toxic consumer rich media bullshit. The industry saw dollar signs with iOS and Android and never wrote apps for the ecosystem. Remember the days when Instagram was iOS-only? But here we are, resigned to typing on glass for the rest of our lives because some hippie burnout thought it was a good idea.
- tabiv 9mo ago
  You may be intetested in this, if you haven't seen it already. https://crackberry.com/clicks-communicator https://crackberry.com/clicks-communicator
grishka 9mo ago
I've never used a Blackberry but it was much more efficient for me to input text (an essential task for a communication device!) on non-iPhone-style phones with physical buttons.
- danparsonson 9mo ago
  Nothing useful to add except, god I miss my Bold 9700. Every time I slip on this stupid touchscreen keyboard and make a stupid typo on this stupid phone I howl inwardly and wish pain and endless torment upon everyone who took us down this path away from light and goodness. Grumble grumble
  - grishka 9mo ago
    The fun part for me is that an old dumb phone could replace, like, 50% of my smartphone usage, if I could use Telegram on it. We even still have 2G networks with no plans to shut them down. So, a J2ME Telegram client has been on my list of potential future projects for quite some time.

emporas 9mo ago

When a bank eventually requires a more recent phone to work, they will carry three phones, one for that one bank, one more for the rest of the banks, and a personal one. Then they might move somewhere else with different banks and different hardware requirements, they will carry 5 phones.