Is it a piece of paper? No, this is Google's latest phone!

Update: 2019-10-31 10:25 IST

This phone from Google is just a rectangle piece of paper, printed with some information at home. It can hold a credit card with a few snips of scissors.

Google says this Paper Phone is part of a new package of "digital well-being experiments" aiming at giving users a "digital detox." It arrived the same week Google launched its latest phone: the $800 Pixel 4 that can be controlled by a user's hand motions which have built-in radar technology.

Wellness supporters advise keeping the phone in the other room when you sleep. There's a movement toward "No-Tech Sundays," when members give up their tech for the day. There is also a "National Day of Unplugging."

The Paper Phone also has a phone wallpaper that let you know how many times you have unlocked your device and a "desert island" program that gives users access only to their most essential apps for 24 hours.

Google Creative Lab team lead Emma Turpin wrote in a blog post "We hope these experiments inspire developers and designers to keep digital well-being top of mind when building technology."

The World Health Organization released new guidelines for parents on screen time earlier this year based on research that found behavioural and developmental issues in children who spent hours in front of the screen. Other research has found links between smartphone usage and anxiety.

Tanya Goodin, a London-based digital well-being evangelist, says, "Instead of children's games, they have to look seriously at the fact that we've been rats in this big Silicon Valley experiment. The fact that we can't disengage from technology is exactly because of the things these companies have been doing for years."

Zuckerberg said at a company event that he had told his team to optimise meaningful interactions between users on the platform, rather than maximising spending time on it, as per a tweet from Flipboard editor Ken Yeung.

Paper Phone isn't Google's first effort at using paper products to explore the digital world. In 2014, Google Cardboard introduced, a way to view virtual reality applications on a smartphone. Google said it transported 5 million pairs of the low-tech glasses in 19 months.

Anthony Ramirez, a cyber-navigator at the Chicago Public Library, tweeted his approval of Google's most recent foray into the two-dimensional world and said, "I'm all about minimalism, and this is fantastic and feels like an art project in just the right way."

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