Vintage flip phones are making a comeback

[ZLoth]

From Tom's Guide:

Flip phones are making a comeback – here's why
Vintage feature phones are having their moment in the sun

Flip phones – the compact handsets that ruled the mobile world in the pre-iPhone days – are having a moment.

Influencers are singing the praises of the stripped-down handsets. The New York Times(opens in new tab) is touting them as the device of choice for teens weary of the always-connected lifestyle. And CNN(opens in new tab) is spotlighting flip phones, too, portraying them as "vintage technology" that's caught the fancy of Gen Z.

Any sort of resurgence for flip phones seems surprising. After all, smartphones have dropped dramatically in price if you don't demand premium features – you can find some decent options among the best cheap phones under $300. With even low-cost smartphones putting a mini-computer pocket, why go back to the type of phone that was popular when Tom Brady was an upstart rookie quarterback and not an aging veteran eyeing his second retirement?

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Hmmm... good luck with that Where I work, having a smartphone is practically a requirement because of multi-factor authentication security requirements. For my team, having a smartphone is a MUST because of on-call requirements. Then, of course, there is that part that my smartphone is my personal organizer, my audio player when on the road, and my navigation aid.

[jeffandnicole]

These 3 paragraphs seem to contradict the rest of the article, and only indicates the market for flip phones is going down.  Worldwide, it's a significant drop.  There's nothing of any sort of a 'comeback' presented.

How big is the demand?

Don't confuse flip phone sightins with a full-blown revival, though. Nabila Popal, research director with IDC, tells me that feature phones like flip phones make up a small percent of the market for mobile phones in the U.S.

"Since 2018, they have been less than 5% of the total phone market," Popal said. "In 2021, only 5 million feature phones were shipped to the US versus 153 million smartphones, and we expect a similar number of [feature phones] for 2022."

The percentage of feature phones increases when you consider the worldwide phone market, as you take less connected parts of the globe into account. But even there, falling smartphone prices have eaten into the market share of flip phones, which made up 60% of the global market a decade ago, but account for just 17% of mobile handsets these days.