Advantages of Having a Flip Phone

Smartphones or flip phones? Both come with their advantages and disadvantages. Today, we'll be discussing some of the advantages of purchasing a flip phone.

Price

The average smartphone costs approximately $500,000,000 USD, plus an arm, a leg, and your firstborn child. Or if you don't have kids and aren't planning to, the firstborn child can be substituted with your pets, your books, your DVDs and CDs, your precious laptop, etc.
Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But between data plans and the cost of the device itself, smartphones tend to be more expensive. Your bank account will breathe a sigh of relief at the lower price of a flip phone.

Reliability

My mother's flip phone is over ten years old, and has been dropped many times. The cover of the battery compartment went missing years ago. And it lives on.
Smartphones, on the other hand, frequently have software glitches, and soon develop problems like a bad battery, becoming extremely slow, or they stop working altogether. And that's assuming you didn't drop it, at which point the screen will automatically shatter.

Simplicity and Convenience

Flip phones are simpler, less complex to figure out. You're less likely to spend four years hunting for the feature or setting you wanted. Besides that, because of the less demanding OS, not running four million programs, the battery tends to last longer. People typically charge their smartphones every day. With a flip phone, you could go days upon days without having to plug it in. Sometimes I leave my flip phone on one bar for days before bothering to charge it. (Okay, maybe that's just a 'lazy' thing. I've been known to put it off until there's no bars and it's beeping at me in protest.)
There's also an advantage to its smaller size. Many pockets are too small to hold a bulky smartphone.  People often put them in their back pockets, which is inconvenient if you ever want to sit down. If you don't have a purse or something to hold it, you have to buy a belt clip, or invent some creative way of carrying it. (All the women pulling their phones out of their bras...) With a flip phone, however, you can easily put it in the front pocket of your jeans.

Okay, this isn't a flip phone, and the Nokia 3310 is from 2000. But the meme still applies to today's flip phones.

Disconnected

Having the internet in the palm of your hand can be convenient at times. But it can also be a curse, allowing you to become even more addicted to social media. (I mean, uh, I'm not addicted to social media, forums, and online games! No, not me!)
Besides that, there's also concerns about security, and the possibility of smartphones being hacked. The likelihood is even higher when using the phone in a public place, rather than the secured WiFi network you'd typically have at your house. And considering most people use the internet on their smartphones, there's more personal information on them than a flip phone would generally have.

As you can see, there are many perks to having a flip phone. But tune in next week, when we'll be discussing the advantages of smartphones.