This Phone Helps You Ignore It
Created by the London-based design firm Blond, the Mindfulness phone was designed to only make calls and receive them. The phone has no extra features like texting, a camera, or the ability to run apps.
It can connect to the Internet, but only if the user enables it to. Otherwise, the phone is automatically set to stay disconnected from any WiFi in the area.
The opaque screen simply displays the date, time, and current weather, and mimics a simple cell phone before all the bells and whistles were eventually added.
The purpose of the phone is to help people disconnect from their increasingly high cell phone usage. A study done by the Deloitte company in 2016 discovered that people’s cell phone usage increased 13 percent from 2015.
Americans check their smartphones roughly 9 billion times per day, according to PR Newswire, and an alarmingly high number of smartphone screen glances are done in the middle of the night.
Out of the people surveyed, roughly half said they wake up in the middle of the night and check their phone, meaning about 100 million people are disturbing their sleep and checking their phones.
Blond’s phone prototype hopes to break the addiction and start getting people into the habit of not relaying on their phones so much for connection to the world.
Detoxing from technology is said to help people not only sleep better at night, but to help promote face-to-face socialization and communication.
More young adults are finding it harder to socialize and interact with others if it’s not through a cell phone screen. Some studies even show that children who use too much technology experience a delay in their speech development.
Internet disconnection is also suppose to help with removing individuals from living in a false sense of reality that apps like Instagram can create.
The Mindfulness phone is not currently for sale, but other companies have created tools to help people put their phones down and disconnect.
