Smartphones have changed nearly everything in our lives. Its so strange but even a 6 months old smartphone seems to be old in our hands when we see what the market has to offer at the moment!!!
So it’s a little disappointing to see there are still some great features that these modern smartphones lack comparing with old feature phones:
- Voice Dialing:
Voice dialing experience on a smartphone is never close to that of an old feature phone!!! Yes you got me right!! The best voice dialing experience I ever had was with Ericsson T20 (announced in 2000). It was by far better than what I ever experienced with a smartphone!! As far as I remember, my friend’s Nokia 6310 also had a voice dialing feature, working as good as mine.
But How???
The old fashioned voice dialing required you to record a voice tag for each contact. It used to work perfectly and there was no speech to text headache.
Pros:
- Working incredibly well in noisy environments.
- Not affected by your accent.
- Worked perfectly with all the languages.
- Very fast since there was no speech to text process involved.
- Voice tag could be different from the contact name: I could save the contact simply “office” and record the Persian equivalent as voice tag.
- You could simply say “dad” or “dad home” and be sure that your phone will dial the right number.
- No internet connection was required.
Cons:
- Each contact needed a voice tag: It’s not like you had to record voice tags for one thousand contacts. Actually, it never bothered me, since I only used to record voice tags for frequently called contacts. Let’s say 10 contacts. And believe me: My modern smartphone mixes up contacts when it intends to match my voice with over two thousand contacts, and it fails all the time. Why can’t I just limit my choices to 10 frequently called contacts?
- Alarm clock:
Old feature phone alarm could work even when the phone was turned off!!! That’s right!! The alarm could wake your phone up and prevent you from missing your flight or an important meeting.
I don’t know any smartphone with this feature yet. You should keep your phone on which consumes battery and prevents you from having a fully charged phone in the morning. Well you can still leave your smartphone connected to the charger. But it ruins your battery due to overcharging. So the best tip is to put it on flight mode which consumes less than 3 percent of your battery overnight.
Additions:
Well there are things that I sometimes miss from feature phone era. They may not be as important as the ones I mentioned above. So the title of this article only cites the 2 first things. However, I would like to continue and mention some other things:
- One touch dialing:
I had 5 flip phones, including nostalgic Motorola StarTAC 85 and 130 phones and the first Samsung dual LCD phones. You could single handedly flip your phone open and make a one touch dial call by holding 2 to 9 keys. Well the android phones provide you this feature by “direct call” widgets. But you still need to unlock your phone.
Anyway, on non-flip phones, this feature could cause accidental calls, unless you had turned on keyboard lock.
- Longer Battery Life: Any questions about it???
- Head up texting: I always had the bad habit of texting when I was driving!!! I know: it’s illegal, wrong, dangerous, and a big, big mistake to type when you are driving. But I could type head up, and single handedly on old keyboards without looking at the phone. Well I still do texting when I’m stuck in traffic. But I believe its much more dangerous when I do it on a full keyboard smartphone!!!!
- Faster Boot.
- Faster telephony: I can’t help but the old feature phones were faster and easier for making calls.
- More compact sizes.
- Durability: I used to drop my old phones a couple of times a day, and I was never worried about breaking my expensive LCD!!!
- Phone strap: Old phones used to have a hole at one edge for connecting a phone strap. It happened a lot of times to me that I dropped my phone, but I could save it on the way to the ground by holding the phone strap. Clever idea!!! (Some smartphone cases have this feature)
- Neck strap, with built in hands free: My old Ericsson T20 could be hung from my neck thanks to the included neck strap which also had a built in wired hands free. Voice dialing could be performed by holding the hands free button.
behrang202 