A lot of us check our smartphones hundreds of times a day, slowly becoming addicted to our small rectangles of aluminium and Gorilla Glass; the Substitute Phone is trying to change that.
Created by Austrian designer Klems Schillinger, the Substitute Phone is no smartphone at all. Rather it’s a small slab of black polyoxymethylene plastic with white stone beads embedded into its ‘screen’.
The idea is to have a gadget that tickles the urges to fiddle with a phone without the need to actually check for texts, Instagram updates, or Tinder matches, with Schilliner noting he wanted to create “a tool that would help stop this ‘checking’ behaviour”.
That’s a pretty ambitious task, given that we’d expect anyone who’s dropped say £999 on the new iPhone X to want to get their money’s worth by near-constantly using it, rather than stroke a few pebbles.
But it could be a boon for people who really find their smartphone checking addiction to be a real pain rather than an opportunity to wonder at how we now have pretty powerful computers and communications devices that can fit into an average sized hand.
The Substitute Phone isn’t on sale yet, though Schillinger has said he’ll release it soon. For the time being it sits as part of an exhibition for the Vienna Design Week that’s been centred around getting offline and back to basics.
But if you find all that to be hokey and backwards, why not splurge on some tech with the best Cyber Monday deals we’ve rounded up and stick it to smartphone apologists.
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Related: Best Black Friday deals
Do you worry about smartphone addiction? If so, get in touch on Facebook or Twitter.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
