I personally got the idea to go "back" to dedicated devices around the Covid lockdown. Of course, at the time it didn't make sense to actually put it in practice because nobody was leaving their homes, but that's where I hatched my reasons to do it and started laying down some plans on what devices to actually use separately from my phone.

Then the whole dumb phone fad and "anti-rot" EDC trends popped up and I feel like they've trapped themselves into the idea of "healthy" and "distraction-free" reasons for doing this. How is the fact that you need to switch between devices constantly to do what others can do with just a single device, or the need to carry 5x to 10x the usual weight, "distraction-free" or "healthy"? This is not a feature, this is the price you pay for dedicated devices. You gotta find worth in dedicated devices despite the fact that you need to carry so much more.

Battery life

So one of the dedicated devices I wanted to go back to was a music player. And it was mainly because I listened to music on my phone a lot (I currently am not doing that but I'm just transitioning from a Spotify subscription I'm no longer paying for, to a selfhosted Navidrome solution) and that would drain my battery SO fast, and then I'd often find myself unable to look up the trip back home in Google Maps after hanging out because my phone had died out. Or unable to text my family to tell them I'm on my way or something.

So one big advantage for me was saving the phone's battery for tasks that only my phone can do.

An eReader also falls in this category. They are just so much more battery efficient for reading books than your phone screen.

Obsolescence, or device lifetime

Another dedicated device I wanted to bring back into my life was a camera. I've never been a big fan of paying high-end prices for smartphones just for the ability to take better photos (as I find that's not the biggest feature of a phone to me), and also having to contend afterwards with the need to update the phone if JUST the camera had fallen behind, even if the rest of the phone was still performing well.

So having a separate camera allows me to update each device separately, without having to upgrade everything every year just because one of the parts has fallen behind.

And uh. That's it, really. To be fair the battery one is like, behind 90% of my decisions around dumbifying my devices or separating them into dedicated roles. I've been unsure for a long time whether I wanted a DAP for audio, or if I just wanted a secondary phone for music + video (like youtube) + social media. I don't really want to pay for two phone plans tho so my main phone would need to fill a hotspot role 24/7, which drains battery a lot anyway. Ideally, a dumb phone that is 4G or 5G compatible that also has a hotspot mode as my main phone would be great. But I don't know if even the phone being dumb would be enough to "solve" the battery drain issue. And also it should still let me look up my way around (I am SO lost without Maps) and let me communicate with ease, which dumb phones are notoriously not good at.