#unihertz

today my unihertz jelly star phone came in the mail. here's some of my initial thoughts!

first -- it's absolutely adorable. I had to go in person to a service carrier for help with getting a sim card switched over, and the store workers kept commenting on how cute the phone is. it's small -- credit card sized, but not impossible to type on if you are experienced with typing on touch screen mobile devices. it does certainly take a lot longer to type things out, which I am very okay with! I got this phone so I would use it less and to be intentionally inconvenient.

i got the green color, which you can only get through dumbwireless.com. it was cheaper there than on the unihertz website when i purchased it.

i think that if you downloaded a bunch of apps onto this phone, it wouldn't work great as a dumbphone, because honestly it's runs Android 13 quite well! there's no lag and the display screen is crisp.

I'm using it for talk, text, maps, weather, and the occasional internet browser search or QR code scanning. I'm not downloading any social media, with the exception of snapchat, because my extended family has a giant snapchat group chat that is somehow still alive and strong after seven years.

the camera, for a phone with a 3 inch screen, isn't half bad! here's a picture I took at the same time and position as the above pics, but with my jelly star.

nothing special of course, but it's discernable and gets added to google photos. i'm honestly impressed. there's a selfie camera too but the quality is poorer. i have yet to try out video.

text and calling works great so far (even with my spotty service), although I can't receive images or videos from iphones via SMS. the speaker is also quite robust, which is great because I use speaker phone often.

i transferred from an iphone 13 and it was pretty easy. i just had to buy a sim card and activate it with my carrier through my existing iphone. then i took the sim out of my iphone and put it into my jelly star. i went through the automatic setup process without transfering anything over. it may be more difficult if you have a more recent iphone, which does not have a sim card slot. to get my contacts, i just saved my apple contacts to a file and sent the file to my email, and then synched the file to my google contacts. played around with some settings and home screen setup, and that was it!

speaking of tech heres my new phone! its the unihertz titan 2 for anyone whos curious. i love it so much, i dont think ill be going back to iphones. (i made the rose meme my lockscreen cuz i find it funny)

I don't mind you asking at all! It's going pretty well! I am still using the unihertz jelly star and it works great! I am considering eventually going down to an even "dumber" (I hate this terminology) phone in the future though. The jelly star is still very much an android smartphone and I've found myself occasionally checking Tumblr or reddit in browser which is not what I want to be doing :( I briefly hopped back onto Tiktok for a bit two weeks ago and re-remembered why I got the heck off of that platform, so I disabled my account. Overall, I'm happy with my decision but think that the jelly star has a few too many features for my taste.

Overall though, I've been reading more, knitting more, cleaning the house more, and I definitely still get enough screentime for enjoyment through going on Tumblr on my laptop. My screentime on my jelly star is about 30 min to an hour a day, most of which is texting and phone calls.

My wife and I have been playing board games, sitting on our porch to read, and generally spending more quality time together, and when I'm with friends I no longer have that instinct to check my phone every twenty minutes. Overall I highly recommend it, but if your self control is low like mine, I'm not sure a jelly star is the perfect choice because of its capacity to still do all the smartphone things. I do think the camera is quite good tho, which is a great positive as someone who enjoys snapping pictures of things that make me happy.