In my short story What Do You Wish, which I published in The Beast Soldiers And Other Stories collection, a man finds a flip phone on a bus that asks him what he wishes for. When I wrote the story, I was reminiscing about the time that I had owned a flip phone–how simple and useful it was without the bells and whistles we have today
Of course, a smart phone can do so much more than a flip phone can. A smart phone can store hundreds of apps, record videos, and allow video conversations (i.e. FaceTime), etc. In contrast, the flip phone was designed to simply make phone calls and to send basic text messages (without all the fancy emojis), and maybe open some basic games (I used to play Othello on mine).
About 15 years ago, I was driving down a dirt road to work and thinking to myself, “What if I didn’t have the phone [flip phone] with me? What if I had left it at home?”
Today, it’s unfathomable to leave the house with our cellphone. It would be like leaving our wallet or keys behind at home. We’ve become so dependent on our phone that we constantly check it for emails and the news, even relying upon it for directions (using the GPS) instead of using our intuition/memory.
As cellphones become more advance, they’ll be faster and have a lot more features added on, as well as improved functionality. But when I think about the time when flip phones were prominent, I’m reminded of a time when I hardly ever used the phone, when things were a lot quieter, when I could focus on reading and writing without all the alerts and notifications.
Fallton Havenstonne 