Recently I had a pair of push-button telephones in my hands. Phones and telephones. Although three thousand rubles for a simple dialer at the end of 2020? Double the amount, and there will be a smartphone that will do it in all respects, except for battery life. And fragility. And it will have a touchscreen, which isn’t always a boon. And … In general, there were so many such “and …” that I seriously thought about the fact that it is by no means only economy and retrograde that one can and should explain such popularity of push-button dialers. And here’s what happened.

According to statistics, almost half of the country still uses push-button telephones in our country. And not all of these people go hiking, fishing, or even more so hunting, as sellers of super-autonomous dialers are trying to convince us. This means that they buy push-button devices not only for the sake of a long working time. The simplest and most obvious answer is that they are bought for reasons of economy for those who do not need smartphone functionality. That is, children and elderly relatives. Previously, taxi drivers and couriers fell into this category, but take a look around. Couriers and taxi drivers need a smartphone, otherwise they simply won’t be able to work, because their work is now coordinated through mobile applications. At the same time, let’s cross out elderly relatives, unless they live their whole lives in a remote village, from where they last left to support B.N. Yeltsin. There is no Internet (in fact, there is), they still use a wired telephone to communicate with city relatives, and all friends and acquaintances live right there, on the next street. The rest of us need a smartphone. Otherwise, they will not be able to contact their youth friends (a push-button telephone will not be able to go to Odnoklassniki), or help their grandchildren do their homework, because they are now also sent in electronic form. And this is not a joke, I look at the environment of my 74-year-old mother – whoever did not have a smartphone, he got one during the pandemic. There is no need to talk about children. Having tasted toys on their parent’s iPhone, they switch from a children’s dialer with smeshariki to smartphones. Brutal button bricks with a classic design are passing by.

But there are situations and behavioral patterns when the advantages of a push-button telephone outweigh the greater functionality of a smartphone. And people consciously choose a simple dialer.

Price matters

Yes, the very first and most obvious motivation for buying a push-button phone is cost savings. If you are the same notorious saleswoman in Pyaterochka who works for 15 thousand a month from dawn to dawn without sleep and rest, weekends and holidays, then the choice in favor of a push-button device is quite obvious. The price of a “button” is about a thousand rubles, the price of a functional smartphone is at least 10 thousand. Speaking of a functional smartphone, I mean one that will not cause problems with applications running on it. Usually, people with small incomes do not have the necessary education or mentality to help them figure out how to make Android toss and turn on weak hardware. Most often, after buying such an ultra-cheap smartphone, people have a purely negative perception of all these newfangled things. Their personal experience suggests that the push-button telephone coped with communication tasks not only as well, but even better. And they didn’t get any benefits from all the capabilities of mobile applications, because they simply did not work properly.

Alcatel 2003D weighs 72 grams, has two slots for SIM-cards, is equipped with a flashlight, can record conversations, can replace a music player and costs less than XNUMX rubles

In addition, it should be borne in mind that a smartphone is a consumer of the mobile Internet. Many people buy it with old tariff plans or very limited packages. There is not enough traffic, it is bought in addition, costs are growing, but the smartphone is still not happy. It turns out both expensive and bad. A push-button telephone is cheap and good. The choice is obvious, so moving away from smartphones in favor of just phones is by no means an impossible thing. And in the long run, you shouldn’t forget to add a very short lifespan to a cheap smartphone to the cost of ownership. Even if it has passed the fate of being broken in a fall and it was assembled from more or less high-quality components, the impossibility of updating the software will come to the fore. Those who choose smartphones, even if not quite cheap, but models for 10-12 thousand, often turn out to be the owners of a model that entered the market a couple of years ago. Even in the best case scenario, such a model does not have updates after a year, and many B- and C-brands do not update their models at all or do it so irregularly that in fact no bugs are fixed. Plus, old hardware turns out to be worse adapted to updated versions of applications. And that’s all. The device may be in good working order, but it’s more like a brick than a smartphone. The push-button telephone, of course, does not have such disadvantages. Choosing a model with better materials in the store, you can operate it for 3-5 years without any problems. The functionality will not change in any way until the buttons are erased.

And talk?

If you look at the characteristics of smartphones and ordinary phones, you will notice that they have a similar parameter in terms of autonomy. Namely – the time of the conversation. Formally, if you suddenly only talk on your smartphone during the day, its charge will really last for 10-12 hours. But nobody uses a smartphone like that. Even if it just lies on the table, it will be connected to some kind of network, it will download some updates. In short, it will lose charge faster. Plus all sorts of VoLTE, etc. So it turns out that 5-6 hours of talking on the phone will send most smartphones to a knockdown, when the user will have to think more about how to save battery than about work. Accordingly, if someone needs a phone for talking more than for any other activity, the smartphone will no longer be a priority. It will be the second device, not the first. The first will be a push-button dialer, which will last a couple of days in heavy mode with hours of continuous calls without problems.

Texet TM-D324 does not have a digestible name, but it received a large screen by the standards of phones and a 4100 mAh battery, which is enough for a couple of months of battery life or for a couple of days of continuous conversation

There is a separate category of people for whom it is important not only to speak, but also to record conversations. If this is an ordinary phone, then there is no problem. We chose a model with this function, inserted a larger memory card, activated the conversation recording in the menu, and that’s it. You can use it without any additional settings and checks, what was recorded, what was not recorded. The situation is worse with smartphones. Some models will not be able to record your conversation at all. Others will need to install a third party app. The third will run out of memory at a critical moment, and he will write down only half. And so on and so forth. If your profession is associated with the mandatory recording of your telephone conversations (for example, this is very much in demand among lawyers), then a simple phone will be chosen for its simplicity and reliability, which a smartphone will not have.

For those who are not afraid to get their hands dirty

Let’s now talk about how to use your smartphone when your hands are wet or dirty. The correct answer is to wipe your hands, then use the apparatus. But it will not always be possible to do this, but if you need to answer the call promptly? So the “button” becomes the choice for those whose hands can be wet, dirty or with gloves at work. Russia is a northern country, where in winter in the fresh air you can accidentally freeze to the wonderful metal or glass of the smartphone body. And it becomes not very convenient to manage it in such conditions, one well-known blogger somehow even fantasized about the development of schemes for using smartphones controlled by the tip of the nose. But all these face recognition systems and fingerprint scanners, and just the disgusting sensitivity of the screen sensor in the cold, get in the way of such experiments.

Nokia 800 Tough is more expensive than budget smartphones, but it has large buttons and is not afraid of water and dirt

There are more than enough professions in which you have your hands or gloves on, or not very clean. There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of auto mechanics around the country, and it is not very convenient for them to constantly wash their hands of oil. Moreover, often the same phone must be nearby to communicate with other clients. There is a place for a smartphone in the lives of these people, but more and more I see that a good old push-button telephone serves as a means of communication in a car service.

It’s not a pity to break and lose

Another point is the risk of losing the device. Due to your own carelessness and carelessness, or due to someone’s malicious intent, or even simply due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances, a situation may arise when no precautions and no protection of the case will save your device. A friend of mine once dropped a protected smartphone. From a height of 30 meters. In the sea at the pier. What MIL-STD level is needed to withstand such a blow, or what IP is required in order not to drown in sea water at a depth of fifteen meters? We do not even think about searching for the apparatus somewhere in the sea mud at the quay wall of the shipyard. In fact, it is not necessary to be extreme to face such a situation, and the loss of a smartphone is a loss of at least ten thousand rubles. You need some kind of connection, for example, on the beach, but will you leave your Galaxy Note or even, God forgive me, Xiaomi Mi9 Pro on the beach unattended? But Russian beaches rarely provide such an option as a luggage room, and even warn that it is better not to donate valuable things to it. Losing a simple dialer in such a situation is both unlikely and not so painful.

The Vertex brand is not associated with anything other than the low cost of the devices. 600 rubles is also a loss, but much less tangible for the budget than tens of thousands of rubles in loss in case of losing a smartphone

Emergency communication

And in general, not everyone and does not always need the full scope of smartphone functionality. There are a lot of people for whom a smartphone is simply uncomfortable at some particular moment, because there is no way to pay attention to it as well. For example, emergency communication for a young mother. Her hands can be wet, and her smartphone is discharged, and a thousand other small moments that will prevent her from connecting in the usual way. And here there is an emergency channel, so that relatives do not go crazy, “losing” their mother. Moreover, there are more and more apartments without a landline telephone. And if such a telephone is available, then it may be a DECT handset, the batteries of which will be discharged at the most inopportune moment. And until they get charged, you won’t be able to talk on such a phone at all. Young mothers, elderly relatives, children – all of them can fall into the category of those who may need emergency communication. And a simple push-button dialer with some simpler tariff will be a salvation.

Communication in places where wolves are afraid to cope

Another point, which is somehow rarely thought about, is not the best network coverage in summer cottages. As a rule, one operator catches there, and all the others are present insofar as. And just smartphones with their love of finding the fastest connection tend to sit down quickly and do not provide a connection. Of course, one could argue that many of them will have a second SIM card slot, where it is reasonable to insert a suitable one. But in real life, this slot is often or not at all, or it is occupied by a memory card, or there is already a second SIM-card, which is mandatory and does not save the situation. Whether you will be engaged in rearranging the SIM cards before each departure or will you put up with the lack of communication – in any case, this will not be the most convenient scenario. A weekend phone with a suitable SIM card will be optimal.

Bright inserts in the body of a protected smartphone are not only a moment of image, but also a completely functional detail: it is much more convenient to look for an orange phone than a camouflage one. Although manufacturers stubbornly produce such

Well, those same fishermen, hikers, hunters. Again, no extreme. You went to Crimea, where there are no mainland operators, and roaming costs as if you flew to Mars. And they went to the beach. With children and elderly relatives. To the healing Saki mud. Well, what kind of smartphone is that ?!

Sovereign people

A completely separate category of people is those to whom the phone is not given out, but they are required to be in touch. And at the same time they prohibit using social networks, taking pictures at work, etc. It doesn’t have to be an army. Similar rules apply to many law enforcement agencies or their units, as well as to sensitive facilities. It is clear that in most cases such workers actually use smartphones. In another division without Telegram, everything will stop, because, in addition to the official system for transmitting orders, word of mouth has long worked, ensuring not only the receipt of the order, but the readiness to execute it. In the XNUMXst century, it has predictably shifted to the digital realm, but it hasn’t died. However, even with such a disregard for formal requirements, everyone will have a push-button telephone without a camera. Because everyday life is one thing, and being reviewed by the superiors is another. And not everyone can violate the settings in terms of their status. The flyers’ smartphones nailed down are not at all the hands of Photoshop masters.

BQ has released a special series of Tank phones, which was created with an eye on the requirements of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, but it turned out to be not at all in demand by the military, which is why the camera and other attributes of a modern phone were returned to the devices.

The employer issued

Above, I already wrote that the same taxi drivers and couriers have actually ceased to be the main consumers of push-button telephones. However, many employers believe that they should provide minimal communication. And they just give out a phone for work. With a service number. Often this is just a connection, for example, with a remote point of sale. There has never been a landline telephone, and there should be a minimum level of availability at all times. This is such a peculiar level of emergency communication, which is either not used at all, or used from time to time. Someone saves money and relies on the employee’s personal phone, while someone provides both the apparatus and the tariff. Considering that no communication other than voice is required in this case, there is not the slightest sense to buy a smartphone. With the development of other communications and the increasing spread of digital services for doing business, this category of consumers will decline. But this is still a long way off, even in large cities.

Key phones on the market to be!

This is how the audience of push-button telephones users is recruited. And it will be recruited even after the level of security and the duration of the smartphones’ operation catches up with them and surpasses them. Moreover, one must understand that almost any category of devices will have their fans even after the actual need disappears. I know a lot of people who, until recently, remained faithful to the “clamshell”. For them, this form factor was important just out of habit.

To buy a folding smartphone, you will need hundreds of thousands of rubles or more. If you do not have such means, but want a clamshell, you will be offered just phones. Two orders of magnitude cheaper, but also with 3G support

In fact, the massive displacement of push-button telephones has only begun since instant messengers and social media have become an essential means of communication for all on the go. While the correspondence in the conditional “Vkontakte” worked in e-mail mode, when it was possible to read a message at any time and answer many hours later, the majority did not need a messenger on the phone. When these hours turned into minutes, push-button dialers began to be supplanted by all categories of users. Even those who, due to their age or habits, preferred voice communication, were forced to switch to more modern methods of communication, otherwise they simply began to lose touch with the necessary contacts.

Nevertheless, push-button devices will retain their niche in the foreseeable future. Few people will have such a phone as anything more than an addition to their main smartphone. But millions of people will continue to buy them for the sake of the listed, at first glance, not so great advantages.

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