In the mid-’90s, public use of the internet boomed, and it’s been all downhill ever since. I mean, let’s be honest with ourselves for a second. While the internet can be used to do great things, most people would rather browse cute cat pics or sling hate speech than work on anything productive.
Image: Samsung
So to help break that addiction, Samsung has created the Galaxy J2 Pro, which is a smartphone that goes out of its way to block mobile data connections. That’s right, this is a smartphone that can’t access the internet.
Billed as a device for students and seniors, Samsung is even running a special discount for buyers aged 18 to 21 when the device launches in South Korea on June 30. Presumably, the idea is that if students aren’t distracted by various internet memes or social media apps, they will have an easier time studying and performing well in school. Meanwhile, for elder citizens, the J2 Pro could help simplify modern living by making today’s smart devices a little less complicated.
What’s even funnier is that the specs of this phone aren’t half bad. Priced at ₩199,100 (about $240), the J2 Pro features a 5-inch QHD AMOLED screen, an unnamed quad-core processor, 1.5GB of RAM, and a microSD card slot. The phone even has a 5-MP cam in front and a 8-MP cam in back, which means you can use the phone to snap all the photos you want – as long as you don’t mind not being able to share them with anyone.
That isn’t completely true, because if you want to go through the hassle of snapping some pics and then transferring them off the phone via a USB cable or microSD card, you can still upload the photos to the internet.
It’s a similar situation for apps. There isn’t really anything stopping someone from sideloading software onto the J2 Pro using a standard Android APK, just so long as the app itself doesn’t require a data connection to function. That means dictionary, calculator and note-taking apps should function just fine, while Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook remain out of commission.
But if you think about it for a minute, this no-internet smartphone is actually a stroke of genius. If there was some kind of barrier of entry, even one with an easy workaround such as this, there’s a good chance there’d be a lot less dick pics or life-sucking apps floating around, constantly vying for our attention.
Unfortunately, while the Galaxy J2 Pro is already available in Australia for $229, the Australian model appears to have full internet capabilities. That’s a shame, because I bet there’s a lot of people others than South Korean students and senior citizens could benefit from an internet-incapable phone.
[via SlashGear]