alt Hacker NewsI’m under the impression that the main problem of cellphone addiction is that stuff like short form video is too addictive—YouTube, and then TikTok just made it worse.
IMO an e-ink (or whatever it is, black and white and, I think it is non-emissive?) screen with a small text-only OLED display is pretty good. But, to be called a productivity device, it needs a bigger screen and a full keyboard.
This thing is a PDA. Which is fine. But a PDA is an organization and communication device, right? Not productivity.
Making it unpleasant to use seems like a mistake. Productivity requires ergonomics, and ergonomic things are pleasant to use, there’s no getting around it. But we can maybe kill off the flashiness.
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It's so easy to get sucked in to scrolling short videos. You can uninstall the apps which makes it a bit better. The worst offender is Youtube which I keep for music but can't remove shorts from.
An e-ink display allows me to get sucked into reading on my phone. It eliminates half my time-sinks but makes the other half a little nicer. A device with a bad screen would make my productivity go up overall, but I wouldn't be using the device to do any work.
So perhaps what's needed for productivity on the device itself is in fact a much bigger screen. Those "tri-fold" phones might be big enough, if you could somehow also fit a usable keyboard in your pocket along with the phone.