 We've had smartphones for about 10 years, but between all the social media networks and notifications, there's a sense that they're starting to take over our lives. Now I have an iPhone 6 and it's a pretty good phone. The problem is I spend a lot of time on it, scrolling through Twitter, Instagram, and whatever else. So to help me deal with my iPhone addiction, I decided to play around with some more minimalist phones. That includes the Unihertz Jelly, the Nokia 3310, the Punk'd MP-01, and the Lite phone. I'm going to head to Brooklyn's Prospect Park to see how disconnected I can get. This is the Jelly, a tiny little Android smartphone. Unihertz, the creators call it impossibly small, amazingly cute, and totally functional. Only two of those things are true, but I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. First thing you'll notice about the Jelly is just how small it is. At three and a half inches in length, it fits into the palm of my hand. It costs $125, it runs on Android 7, has a 1.1 gigahertz processor, and has front and rear facing cameras that are 8 and 2 megapixels, which isn't that great. The phone runs on 4G network and has dual SIM cards. Now because of the thickness, a lot of people thought it had a slide out keyboard, which it doesn't, but it does have a two and a half inch touchscreen that's fully functional. Back to those two truths from the line. The Jelly is impossibly small and amazingly cute, and there's just something cool about having the full functionality of a smartphone in such a small package. Scrolling through an Instagram live video on such a tiny screen is just kind of fun. And if you want to disconnect, there's a purpose to the smallness. With the screen so small, it adds a level of friction that we're not typically used to, so I found myself reading less and actually just pulling my phone out less entirely. But the Jelly's small size actually threatens its functionality. Using the Jelly's dimple sized keyboard was almost impossible, and I kept making tons of mistakes. In the end, I started texting less because I wanted to make less typos. The Jelly's other big drawback is battery life. Downloading just a few apps made my phone hot, and I lost almost 20% of my battery. At 83%, it told me I only had four hours of life left, which meant that I had to carry on this huge battery pack all day long just to make it through the day. And if you want to use the phone less, maybe that's not such a bad thing. But if you really want to disconnect, you might want to ditch your smartphone for a feature phone. The Nokia 3310 is one of the most iconic and popular phones of all time, and in 2017 the company re-released it as part of its nostalgia driven marketing push. Now, the new phone benefits from a larger color screen and a more bubbly design than its brick-like predecessor. It has a two megapixel camera in the back and runs on Nokia's proprietary OS. It comes with the classic 2002 era skeleton crew of apps like a calculator, a calendar, and obviously Snake. Unlike the Jelly, it has pretty good battery life, about six and a half hours of talk time and 650 hours of standby time. And it's cheap. You can get one for 60 bucks. You'll notice the home screen has a couple of new additions including a Facebook and Twitter button, but open them up and you get stuck in Nokia's weird web client that you have to navigate with a clunky directional pad. It's so hard to use that eventually I just gave up, and maybe if you're trying to disconnect, that's not really a problem. Moving over to the Nokia also comes with another big shift, and that's going from a full keyboard to T9. And if you're like me, you haven't used T9 in a while and it takes some getting used to. It can definitely be clunky, but if you're trying to text less, it works. T9 is too slow to text bomb, and eventually, you might just stop texting altogether. If you really want to get intentional about minimalist phones, you might want to check out Punk's MP-01 phone. Punk means period or stop in German, and it's a Swiss company that makes minimalist products. A lot of times when people see the MP-01 for the first time, they think it looks like a calculator, but I kind of actually like the design. It comes in three colors, brown, black, and white. It's four and a half inches tall. It has Gorilla Glass and a fiberglass reinforced body, so it feels sturdy in the hand. Navigating the phone is actually pretty easy because it only does two things, and it has buttons to navigate towards them, and that's texting and calling. The only hitch is that it costs $230, which is a lot for a phone that only does two things. And of those two things, it doesn't do one of them very well, and that's texting. So most phones, when you text, they create a thread, but the MP-01 actually breaks it up like email. It's an inbox, sent, draft, etc., which is really confusing and kind of a pain in the ass. And the phone did a pretty bad job of capitalizing my sentences when I text, which is really pretty basic stuff. It kind of feels like the perfect phone for somebody who can afford to hire someone else to take care of the rest of their lives. Oh, and did I mention that it only runs on a 2G network? And T-Mobile is one of the few carriers that still supports 2G in the US? And they're going to phase it out by 2020, all of which makes MP-01's claim that the phone is a timeless device feel kind of empty. If there's one phone that really represents the minimalist phone movement, it's the Lite phone, a business card-sized device that you can either tether to your phone or use independently. It costs $150, and it literally only does one thing, and that's make phone calls. New phones try to dazzle you with big, bright displays and bezel-less design, but not the Lite phone. The Lite phone really doesn't want any of your attention. It's a beautiful device, and a lot of people I showed it to didn't even believe it worked, but it works exactly as advertised. And there was something freeing knowing that I could leave the house just with this and reach somebody if I really needed to. At least, I hope I could, because if I'm being honest, people don't really pick up their phones anymore. I mean, I make one phone call a day, maybe, but I'm texting all the time, either through Messenger or Slack or Twitter, and that makes the Lite phone feel like an experiment more than a viable product, an effort to gauge whether people would really be interested in such a minimal device. And apparently they are. In 2018, the company announced Lite phone 2, a 4G version that would have E-Ink display, a full keyboard, and possibly even some features like maps and music. But loading smartphone features onto such a minimal device is probably going to have problems of its own. I spent a lot of time with these phones over the last couple of weeks, and what I've realized is that I don't really want a phone that limits my communication or one that makes me make more phone calls. In 2018, a lot of our communication happens over text, and I don't really think that's such a bad thing. What I don't really need is all the social media networks, all the notifications, the short battery life, and the bezel-less screen. That's what kind of makes phones overwhelming, not a text from my mom or a friend. What I really want is a smartphone functionality stripped of all the gizmos. Unfortunately, a lot of these minimalist phones threw out the texting baby with the social media bathwater. So until they figure that out, I'm just going to delete my social media apps and keep my iPhone. Fox.com has a video that explains how addictive smartphones could be. Click here to watch it and find out how necessary a minimalist phone could be for you.