I don\u2019t know exactly when I first gravitated to the idea of the shutdown-night phone. I assume it was in those dark days of late 2010\/early 2011 when I needed to detach from the world, and it became a thing as social media and news and everything else crept into my space. Sometimes you need to filter it all out, put it all away, force the world to leave you alone – but at the same time, you don\u2019t want to cut yourself off from absolutely everyone and everything. You still need music in your ears, something to read, the ability to be contacted in an emergency especially if you go out to do this, possibly some way of getting a cab back, etc etc and so on and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some amount of this could be put down to phone addiction and FOMO on my part, certainly. But I think something has shifted in society. The phone is barely a phone any more. A contemporary iPhone has about as much in common with a Nokia 3310 as a virtual reality headset has with a pocket calculator, and that\u2019s not a comparison I make lightly. Cyberspace is now the sea in which we swim, and the phone is the flippers, the wetsuit, the oxygen tanks. You can splash around on the beach, but if you\u2019re going in, you won\u2019t last long without it, and people expect that you will be in the sea now. Boomers act like a cell phone is a sign of wealth and luxury, and in the meantime, going to the San Francisco Farmers Market without one would entail finding train schedules somewhere, buying a ticket from a machine, taking cash for payment and finding a book or Walkman or something on the ride up. Do you need a phone? No, but modern life without one is a much higher degree of difficulty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which is why I had the shutdown phones – simple dumb phones first, later superseded by the Moto X or the iPhone SE, devices that I could pare down to just the Kindle and Wikipedia and music apps and maybe Lyft if needed and\u2026that meant another SIM card and another phone number or having to constantly move between. It was preposterous and ultimately pointless, especially once the Downtime controls in iOS meant you could lock out all the offending apps and notifications for the duration of a Sunday night. And that\u2019s when the separate phone stopped being a thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the temptation to bypass those controls is occasionally too much to overcome, especially when one is not in a great frame of mind. And you\u2019re back to \u201cI want to set the degree of isolation higher, but without having to give it all up.\u201d Make it possible to leave the house and go to dinner with just one phone, a dumb phone with the same number, be able to contact people if need be but without having to delete a bunch of apps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I say all this to say: I have temporarily activated the cellular feature of the Apple Watch through Visible, the Verizon MVNO. I could not do it through my work account, because they won\u2019t allow it to be activated, and if I\u2019m going to have a second line it should be on a different network than my main line, so Cricket and Consumer Cellular (both AT&T) are out, and Visible is the only other MVNO that supports Apple Watch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because the watch then becomes the dumb phone: leave the iPhone at home and you can still place and receive calls and texts on the same phone number from your arm. You can pay for things. You can get transit and walking directions, you can look up when the next bus is coming, you can even pop in your earbuds and listen to your music. But you can\u2019t get into a doom scroll, you can\u2019t go numb surfing the web, you can\u2019t stare into the watch display for hours on end. That\u2019s for the book you bring with you (okay, probably the Kindle this day and age).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question then becomes: where are you going with your watch that you aren\u2019t going with your phone? Church, sure, and pub night, and maybe a quick run around the block or to the gym or down to the market and back without needing to grab your phone. But the cellular only kicks in when there\u2019s no connection to the data of the phone itself or to the WiFi. Which means it\u2019s a very occasional fallback at best, one my wife has already test-driven for months and found no use for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But then, she\u2019s a lot better at putting down her phone than I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I guess we\u2019ll see. On the second attempt, I had a blowout on my e-bike, and had to wait for help with no phone and no earbuds. So the immediate limitations are of a piece with, say, the wee little SonyEricsson Z520 that the old Apple lab crew standardized on in 2006. But the functions of a phone from back then, albeit with modern processors and networks, are sufficient to have all alone on one arm. So at some level, it\u2019s worth asking: is it enough to leave the phone at the bedside and venture out with a device you can\u2019t get lost in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019re going to find out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t know exactly when I first gravitated to the idea of the shutdown-night phone. I assume it was in those dark days of late 2010\/early 2011 when I needed to detach from the world, and it became a thing as social media and news and everything else crept into my space. Sometimes you need … <\/p>\n