Tech —

I let Yondr lock my smartphone in a sock so I could “live in the moment”

Yondr makes phone-free movies, concerts, and parties possible with locked case.

I let Yondr lock my smartphone in a sock so I could “live in the moment”
Megan Geuss

Two weeks ago, I heard about a new company called Yondr that was making lightweight smartphone socks-with-locks that prevent the smartphone's user from accessing the device during a concert, movie, or party.

At the time, Yondr had quietly teamed up with two Bay-area music venues—Milk Bar in San Francisco and Stork Club in Oakland—for a pair of trial runs in which concert-goers would be asked to place their phones in the Yondr case before entering the venue in order to create a phone-free space. I was curious—would people even go for this?

Preventing fans from accessing their phones during a show might seem like an extraordinary step, especially in tech-centric San Francisco. But even the most compulsive texters among us can say that they've seen That Person: the guy in front of you at the concert who holds up his iPhone to record eight minutes of video, forcing you to watch your favorite band through his tiny screen, or the girl whose phone lights up with texts while you're in the theater trying to watch an important scene.

Yondr wants to make that impossible.

“Yondr has a simple purpose: to show people how powerful a moment can be when we aren’t focused on documenting or broadcasting it,” the company's website states.

So does it work?

“Hello, my name is Megan”

We contacted Yondr for more information, and CEO/founder Graham Dugoni invited us to the company's launch party on a Friday night in San Francisco. The party, Dugoni informed us, would be phone-free.

As I knew no one who would be going to this event, I felt a bit apprehensive about being phone-less in a crowd of complete strangers. Going to a concert and not looking at your phone is one thing, but being at a party is another. And since I had to drive home afterward, alcohol, with its inhibition-removing powers, would have to be consumed with care and in moderation.

The night of the party, I remembered to wear a watch before I stepped out to paint the town red (I wouldn't be able to check my phone for the time, after all). I went to a friend's art show first, so I arrived at FAME Venue, a bar in San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood, at around 9:30pm. I stepped in and found Dugoni wearing a Yondr shirt and standing behind a table, prepared to ask his guests to slip their phones into Yondr's socks, which come in three sizes—small, medium, and large. “Between the three sizes, we can accommodate any phone on the market (with or without a protective case),” Dugoni told me in a follow-up e-mail.

I requested a medium-sized sock for my four-year-old Motorola Bionic (I have a journalist's budget, people), and Dugoni slipped the front flap of the sock over a pin on the body and attached a beige lock on it. It added almost no extra weight to my phone, and it didn't take up too much extra space, either, although the lock bulged out significantly.

An unlocked Yondr case and its lock-removal pedestal in the background.
Enlarge / An unlocked Yondr case and its lock-removal pedestal in the background.
Megan Geuss

I took one step and turned back around. “Oh! I forgot to put my phone on vibrate!” I realized. Dugoni said it wasn't a problem and took me over to the “exit” station where a small pedestal stood. He pressed the beige lock against this, releasing it.

Dugoni wouldn't tell me exact details of how the locking mechanism works, but it seems similar to those anti-theft tags you find on clothes in department stores.

“The locking mechanism for the cases is something I spent a lot of time on in the early days,” Dugoni told Ars in a follow-up e-mail. “I needed something that was easy to apply and simple to unlock. Elements of the mechanism work similarly to those security tags, but they weren't the inspiration for Yondr.”

After I Yondr'ed my phone (just gonna go ahead and coin that term now), I stepped into the dimly lit room and found 15 people under a “YONDR” sign—a couple deep in conversation at the bar, four people in a tight circle around a high bar table, four people playing beer-pong, three bartenders, one door guy, and a DJ. The DJ was playing some decent alt-pop electronic music. I ordered a glass of white wine and tried to figure out what to do.

I'll be honest—I floundered a bit. The beer-pong players were deep into their game and the Knights of the Square Table were not positioned in a way that I could easily elbow my way in without appearing overly familiar. This feeling of awkwardness was not, I don't think, caused by my current semi-dependence on my smartphone, because I remember feeling the same way at parties in college, back when my phone was of the clam-shell variety and couldn't even take pictures.

Since my purchase of a smartphone, however, I've been able to avoid this floundering feeling by taking a seat at the bar and checking Twitter or pretending to text my soon-to-be-arriving imaginary friend, at least until the party fills up a bit more and I can move into a group without breaking their rhythm.

But not tonight. I took my wine and sort of stood between the beer-pongers and the table top, watching the beer-pong game as a spectator. It felt like an eternity, but it was probably more like five minutes, before one of the beer-pongers finally looked in my direction. I jumped at the chance.

“Hi, I'm Megan and I don't know anyone here!” I said with a sort of self-deprecating laugh. All four of the players cheered, “All right!” I'm not sure what they were drinking, but I appreciated the enthusiasm. Still, a moment later they went back to their game, ignoring me.

When they wrapped up the game a couple of minutes later I started talking to one of the players who was visiting from Taiwan. We talked about San Francisco and what he'd visited in his first week here. He told me he was an industrial designer for a startup overseas. He asked me what I did, and I told him I worked for Ars as a writer and editor. “Oh let me have your e-mail address! I'll send you information about us!” he exclaimed.

This is an exit station attendant unlocking my phone.
Enlarge / This is an exit station attendant unlocking my phone.
Megan Geuss

I realized I didn't have any business cards on me, but he said, “Oh I'll take it down...” and then reached for his phone. “Oh right. I can't,” he said. I wrote the address on a napkin.

The guy then introduced me to his friend, who was also working on a (separate) startup. Unbelievably, the exact same thing happened again. She asked for my contact information, reached for her phone, and realized we couldn't take anything down with our phones locked away.

After an hour and a half, I said my goodbyes and went to the table to get my phone unlocked. The attendant threw my discarded case in a box, in a procedure similar to the one you go through when you see a movie with 3D glasses.

As Dugoni told me in an e-mail, “We have managed to keep product costs very reasonable, so lost, damaged, or stolen cases have not been a serious issue. People stealing cases has been a rare occurrence.”

Being phone-free will make rights holders very happy

At phone-free events, the barrier to entry for reproducing and sharing videos and images of a copyrighted performance is much higher. But according to Dugoni, Yondr is about eliminating distractions first and aiding copyright holders second. “We are talking to quite a few bands about using Yondr for upcoming shows, and some are interested in making it a permanent fixture for their tours,” he wrote to Ars.

“The copyright issue is certainly useful to some, but we have seen a lot more interest on the experiential side. A lot of artists simply want to have phone-free shows because they believe it makes for a better experience. Artists experience the issue most acutely, so it's not surprising they have been receptive to the idea."

Rene Kidinger, the booker and promoter at Oakland's Stork Club, agreed. “The points that both Graham and I agree on and are trying to emphasize are brought on by the massive spike in technological and social media influence over the current generation of young people (Over most people really, but young people are more of a Stork Club demographic),” Kidinger wrote in an e-mail to Ars.

The illustrious Stork Club, on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland.
Enlarge / The illustrious Stork Club, on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland.
Megan Geuss

“We hope that social pressure, gossip, and the mystery of the 'event you should have been to,' will guide people away from their electronic leashes and back into creating new and unique experiences,” Kidinger continued. “Added benefits include showing bands and performers the respect they deserve while on stage, aiding bands and venues in quality control for footage and recordings as well as increased monetary compensation in getting these things as merchandise.”

Naturally, I wanted to see this play out in a setting where real-life concert goers would have to be phone-free. Kidinger told me that Stork Club would be using Yondr for one of the first times publicly at a Thursday night pop punk show, so I went down to the venue, which is a 15 minute drive from my house, and bought a $5 ticket.

The results were pretty mixed.

Channel Ars Technica