When I've headed out somewhere new with friends and ended up in a strange place at 1am, Google Maps public transit directions are my lifeline. If I drove I could just head in the rough direction or use a streetmap, though transit maps aren't usually complete with all routes and times. There is nothing worse than standing at a bus stop for an hour hoping a bus will come, and that bus will take you home. Train stations are alright if the trains are still running, but usually I need to rely on a late night, barely functioning bus network.
I would love an e-paper/ink phone that did maps, texts, calls, photos and nothing else.
This is also the killer feature of a smartphone for me as well. As someone who exclusively uses public transport, I feel my life would be so much harder without the route planning feature of Google maps. Just activate Google assistant, "Bus route to X arrive by Y". It can plan a route with connections that are from different public transport departments, so it is not a trivial amount of work to do manually.
I've already taken some of the steps outlined in this article to normalize my smartphone use. I might be biased because I have fought other difficult addictions like smoking, but smartphone addiction does not seem especially difficult to manage to me. The crucial step is realizing it's existence because it's so ubiquitous it seems normal and benign.
I did the whole flip phone thing for awhile and you can load a version of google maps onto most phones that run Java applets.
Also, I worked on an epaper feature phone startup. But as a company we never got it to take off. I open sourced it to an extent but havent worked on it as much as I would have hoped.
http://woodstead.org/epaper.html
When I've headed out somewhere new with friends and ended up in a strange place at 1am, Google Maps public transit directions are my lifeline. If I drove I could just head in the rough direction or use a streetmap, though transit maps aren't usually complete with all routes and times. There is nothing worse than standing at a bus stop for an hour hoping a bus will come, and that bus will take you home. Train stations are alright if the trains are still running, but usually I need to rely on a late night, barely functioning bus network.
I would love an e-paper/ink phone that did maps, texts, calls, photos and nothing else.