No they don't. What a rubbish clickbait article.

All they say is that there's a (niche) trend of a few people using feature phones with expected combined sales of $2.8 million. Versus the $200 billions of iPhones alone.

Doubt.

Haven't seen a flip phone in use in ages and I work among the public. Even the barely functional elderly on smartphones.

Who paid for this article? What's their angle?

For the past 10 years I never bought a phone for more than 300 euros.

I usually get a new phone every 3 years to have the latest tech and donate or recycle the old one.

For the last year I had an iPhone 13 pro (usually goes around 1100 euro) as a work phone and my personal Redmi Note 11 Pro I bought for 270 euros and not once I told myself: Man, this iphone is at least 3 times better than my Xiaomi. It's clearly a premium product but a middle category budget phone can match most features and even more. I still have a headphone jack, bigger 120 Hz screen, IR blaster and an amazing fingerprint sensor.

I though genZ only bought iPhone because of the green bubble or something?

I don't trust these numbers, I really don't trust any article that talks about my generation.

This same BS headline happens every generation. As soon as any small trends form, the media latch onto it like it's gonna be the next big thing...

No, feature phones aren't gaining mass adoption again. No, feature phones aren't going to kill smartphones. It's just a subset of people deciding to downgrade, or who want to buy a secondary phone.

This is a thing that isn't happening, at least not among Gen Z. What a bullshit article.

If I was not disabled with way too much time to burn, and where the weight of a phone is ideal, I would go back to a dumb flip phone like this. Smart phones are an addiction that, at best, must be consciously managed. Heck, I'm beside my workstation procrastinating right now.

As if we needed another sign that ZDnet was trash…

I fucking hate these obviously bullshit articles. “Gen Z is using feature phones”, “Gen Z are using paper maps”, “Gen Z is doing XYZ”.

No, they aren’t. At best some sad excuse for a journalist found a handful of tweets and wrote a whole article on it like it’s a “trend”.

Look, I know “journalists” are being squeezed to produce at an unreasonable rate but if you write drivel like this then you have no business calling yourself a journalist, hell I don’t even think you can call yourself a “writer” or “contributor” either. It barely passes as writing and you are contributing nothing to society.

These articles of "Gen Z is doing X" is always wrong lol.

If only that's allowed as a choice.

So many places assume you have a smartphone, and so many stuffs require one

This I wish, but I doubt. I still have my old Garmin GPS and play with the idea of a flip phone but I’ve been spoiled by the smaller things like iMessage not dealing with MMS. It’s an idea I come back to occasionally, but I also think about going back to my Palm with AAA batteries for my PIM needs. Had one in semi-regular-use as recent as 2018!

Havent seen "$100 feature phone" since 2017 when my grandpa upgraded his phone
- gen z

The games are better for one.

I'm so tempted to do this.

Relevant xkcd

They all realized a $100 phone does the same shit as a $1500 phone... There is nothing they add to the expensive phones that justify the price

I’ve considered doing this in combination with a Pine phone or other impractical but cool linux phone so that I don’t have to worry about not having at least reliable SMS and calling.

Anyone know if there is a tiny dumb phone out there that doubles as a 4G/5G hotspot?

and the numbers don't lie.

Righto Scott Steiner.

Get this removeded clickbait garbage off my feed OP

Personally I switched to a Qin F22 Pro to curb my smartphone addiction. Only have the essential apps installed on it. So far it has worked out well (I used to have a screen time of over 6 hours every day, now just minutes). Life feels so much more peaceful without all the notification spam I used to get, and my mind is definitely more clear now.

I heard cassettes are making a comeback too.