i reset my phone

I can totally understand why some would choose to buy a new phone instead of reset an old one, as the process of setting up a phone after a reset is seriously annoying.

My phone was long overdue for a reset due to all the crap I had installed/uninstalled over time. Yes, there are "cleaner" utility apps, but they all suck. A reset is the only true way to "clean" a phone...

..except not really.

Setting up a phone involves what used to be called decrapifying. When you bought a PC back in the early-to-mid 2000s, the OS was Windows XP. While the OS was fine, whoever made the computer loaded it up with a metric ton of junk software. Useless antivirus "suites", trialware galore, a bunch of garbage plugins in the browser that sometimes just outright hijacked it, and all sorts of other ridiculous trash. It took the better half of a day to get rid of it all.

The phone is the same thing. True, it's a physically smaller computer with different software, but in the end, it's the same metric ton of junk, now in a mobile flavor.

Yes, this means the phone had to be cleaned twice. The reset cleaned out all the residual crap left behind. After reset, the default OS install reinstalled all the stock garbage that had to be deleted manually.

After dealing with that heapin' helpin' of horseshit, the phone was almost ready to use. Now I'm at the point where I can install and configure stuff. First, import the text messages, photos, and videos. After that, install the small set of apps I use, then configure that stuff. And then, finally, hours later, the phone can be used normally.

The reasons I can get away with using an older smartphone are the same reasons I can get away with using older desktop computers. I know how to get rid of the crap that makes it slow, and I purposely use things that are fast.

When I go to launch my camera app, it's near-instant. The time it takes from when the phone goes in my hand to when I take a photo or start recording a video is under 3 seconds. Not an exaggeration. When I search my text messages, search results are literally instant as I'm typing out the search phrase, regardless of message age.

The only thing slightly slower on my phone is the web browser, but I still don't wait too long since I have everything I need as local bookmarks. Browser loads, bookmarks are there, tap what I want, done. At that point it's just the network I wait for while the site is loading. Even then, the wait is minimal there since I only use sites I know load quick on mobile.

I am so not-in-target-market on mobile that it's not even funny

In this order, I use my phone for texting, recording videos, and taking photos. Way down the line after that are a few open source casual games, the browser with some bookmarked sites that get viewed once in a great while, and a backup navigation app that basically never gets used. Also throw in there that I sometimes but rarely use the calculator and alarm clock apps...

...and that's it.

That "doomscrolling" stuff people do? I don't do any of that. That's a train I completely missed, not that I ever wanted to get on it.

The closest thing to doomscrolling I sometimes do is read old forum posts that go back five years or more. I find it interesting to see what people used to yap about years ago and how so much of it is totally irrelevant now. It's especially interesting if the thread is over a decade old, particularly from around the early 2010s. And when I do read stuff like that, it's never on the phone, so... does it count as doomscrolling if you're reading things on a PC and using a computer mouse wheel for the scrolling part? Probably not.

Whatever is marketed to doomscrollers (which counts for a ton of product) is stuff I'll never see, and that's why I'm very not-in-target-market on mobile.

It still works

I have a phone where the model had its launch year in early 2016. Yes, really. That's not when my phone was physically manufactured, but it was made not too far away from that date either.

The mobile OS version is so old that it won't run most modern apps.

I had to recently take a can of compressed air and blow out the headphone jack, speaker grill and microphone holes because of stuff collected in there. This stuff was mostly little bits of fabric from the phone being in my jeans pocket.

Surprisingly, no corrosion on the USB port. However, it's not shiny anymore and definitely tarnished.

I can get about 3 to 4 days of use before the battery needs a charge. More specifically, my type of use. A doomscroller, assuming their apps would even run on my phone, which they wouldn't, would run the battery down in probably 3 hours. Maybe fewer.

The screen has slight burn-in near the top, only seen when solid white color is shown. I can deal with it.

No 5G on my phone. 4GLTE only.

It still works, and I'll continue using this phone as long as I can.

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