Smartphones have become just too good

Now, here’s what you must understand: my pictures were not “artsy” or “interesting” on purpose. My phone camera really was just so bad that – to quote another friend – it looked like I carried a stick of butter around with me at all times, and made sure to smear the lens each time I wanted to take a picture.

I knew the colleague – an artist, no less – had merely tried to be nice, but for some reason it broke me. I just didn’t want to be “the guy with the horrible phone” anymore. 

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A few days later, I started browsing for newer, better options online, and felt my jaw drop to the ground. The phone I’d bought in 2023 – new and SIM-less – had cost me £170, because I just didn’t understand why anyone would spend more than that when they didn’t really need to.

My 2026 search made me realise that… well, I’d been wrong back then, sure, but mostly I now had to make a choice. In the end I fell for the middle ground, buying a Nothing Phone for £300, a model apparently known for being the best of the “mid-market”. 

I went to pick it up from the store the next day and have now been using it for just under a week. It has been… can I be honest? It’s been weird. I was in the countryside with my partner and his family over the bank holiday, and went to take a picture of some pleasant-looking fields one afternoon. I positioned myself, stayed very still out of habit – my old phone couldn’t take a clear picture if I decided to, say, breathe while doing so – and snapped the grass and the trees.

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The picture was both gorgeous and a disappointment. Sure, everything looked crisp and in focus and the colours were vivid and beautiful, but somehow that just annoyed me a bit. As I realised quickly enough, absolutely everything I take a picture of now looks, at worst, “pretty good”. There’s no jeopardy anymore; no sense that this is a craft I had to become better at over time, and eventually grew to master.

It’s also just easy: my old phone would take multiple seconds to, say, switch from the back camera to the front-facing one, or to move from photo to video. When I did capture something special and fleeting, it meant I’d got really lucky. Now, though? I could probably take a picture of just about anything, making it unremarkable in the process.

Of course, I know this is something that will soon stop feeling unusual to me. Within weeks, I’ll have got used to it, and won’t ever think about my old travails. This is why I wanted to write this piece today: to capture this moment in amber while I could. 

I guess I also wanted to remind myself of the shame I still feel; as long-time readers of this column may remember, I’d originally wanted to buy myself a “dumb phone”, namely something that would allow me to call and text, maybe look at some rudimentary maps and listen to music, and little else. 

I’d really been looking forward to it but, in the end, found that I just didn’t have it in me. The world has changed too much, and I just couldn’t picture a version of my life that both didn’t involve a smartphone yet still managed to be reasonably seamless.

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Instead, I went in the other direction altogether, and decided to give up on my ideals. It was quite a painful and bitter decision to make, but ultimately I do know it was the right one, both for my social life and for my work. 

I do wonder, however, if there may be a third way hiding in plain sight here. Sure, I just didn’t feel up to going back to some more glamorous version of the Nokia brick phone, and I already find my spenny, efficient phone a bit dull, but what if I had it right the first time round?

Maybe what we need is a return to the smartphones of the late 2010s, which was effectively what I owned until now. They offer a lot but do so while groaning, and are never good enough that you want to spend entire days on them. It’s annoying I only realised it a bit too late, but do you not think I may be onto something here? I’ve found the future, and it looks like… 2018.