Skip NavigationCheryl Geliebter says the benefits of using her flip phone outweigh the challenges of using a “dumb phone” in today’s world.Cheryl Geliebter
Cheryl Geliebter gets a lot of looks when she pulls out her phone. That’s because she has a flip phone.
“Most people are blown away,” she tells CNBC Make It.
The 40-year-old New Yorker has only ever used a “dumb phone” — or a phone with basic calling and texting features but minimal, if any, internet access or other “smart” features — as her cell phone. She says it allows her to contact people on the go without the distractions of notifications and the web.
There are technological and social challenges that come with forgoing the conveniences of a smartphone in 2026. Geliebter says she is “left out of stuff” occasionally. Still, “the pros of not having the smartphone outweigh the cons,” she says. “For the most part, I think it’s a blessing.”
‘I wouldn’t be responsible if I had a smartphone’
Geliebter got her first mobile phone at 15, though she says it was more of “a burden” than anything else. She preferred to call her friends from her house phone and would use the computer for instant messaging and email, so she felt it didn’t serve a purpose.
Her whole family stuck with dumb phones for a while after many people started getting smartphones. But Geliebter says her father got a smartphone in 2016 to help plan his commute based on real-time traffic conditions. And about five years ago, when Verizon stopped offering the 3G service their old devices needed, she says, her mother got one to avoid the hassle of texting on a dumb phone.
Geliebter and her younger brother remain on flip phones.
“I decided for myself that I wouldn’t be responsible if I had a smartphone,” she says. “I feel like I have an addictive personality. … Having the internet in front of me is not going to be a good thing.”
Geliebter won a smartphone years ago but didn’t want to use it and never added cell service for it, she says: “I was like, what am I going to do with this thing?”
Instead, she used it as a tablet if she didn’t want to bring her laptop when traveling, and when she needed to access customer rewards apps or scan QR codes, both of which are harder on her flip phone, she says.
“To have everything you need in one little handheld device … it’s a real convenience, and I understand why people are drawn to that,” she says. But there’s something about having to press actual buttons rather than tapping and swiping on a touchscreen. “It grounds you more when things are tactile, and I think that’s something that’s lost in the smartphone world.”
How she makes it work
Geliebter has come up with some solutions for her flip phone difficulties. A self-described “map person,” Geliebter frequently travels with paper maps and a portable GPS device or prints Google Maps directions before venturing out, for example.
Web pages take longer to load, if they can load at all, and she says they’re harder to view on her phone’s relatively small screen. When people text her links, she can’t always open them. She sometimes needs to forward the text to her email address, then access her email from a computer to view the material.
“It’s super annoying using the internet on this thing, which is part of what makes it good,” she says. “Then, I’m not tempted to waste time on it.”
There’s no Notes app here: Cheryl Geliebter scrawls notes to herself on strips of Post-Its she keeps in her phone’s plastic case.Cheryl Geliebter
To make reminders for herself, Geliebter jots down notes — things like renew memberships or swap the credit card she uses for auto-pay — on strips of neon Post-Its she wedges into the plastic case covering her keypad. They’re supposed to serve as visual cues whenever she looks at her device, Geliebter says, but they’ve become “part of the phone.”
“I’ve gotten so used to texting on the stupid keypad that I know where every letter is and how many times to press it,” she says, enough to be able to text through the strips of paper.
Longer texts are challenging, she says. She’ll write them in an email from a laptop or desktop when she’s at work or home, send it to the email address associated with her phone, open it on her phone and forward it to the person she’s messaging.
All told, Geliebter estimates she spends an hour a day on her cell phone. “After I finish a text, I put the phone away,” she says, “because there’s nothing else to do on it.”
‘The rewards are worth it’
Geliebter sometimes wishes her camera quality was better, that she could record videos, and that there were games. But her phone has texting and voice calls on an unlimited plan and, for the most part, that’s all she needs.
While her phone choice doesn’t really affect her work as an elementary school academic support teacher, she says, she nearly missed a birthday party organized in an employee WhatsApp group until a coworker told her about it at the last minute.
And she prefers looking at email on a desktop anyway — no checking work email during the commute home for Geliebter. “I don’t have that compulsion because I don’t have a way to do that reasonably on my phone,” she says.
“It’s not easy in today’s society,” Geliebter says. “People will have expectations of you, and you won’t necessarily be able to live up to them, because you don’t have the technology for it,” she adds. But “the rewards are worth it.”
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