I don’t want a dumb phone. I want a circa 2014 smart phone that is not expected to replace my laptop and serve as a constant data stream for corporations. I want to be able to visit a website on my phone and not have it try to get me to download an app, be ads on 70% of the screen, or just be unreadable formatting. Let me call, text, do a basic online search, play a stupid flash game, and take my money. Stop being greedy and trying to make everything I do monetizable
There is something about the Palm Pre or Jolla Sailfish OS that was so endearing back then. Devices that support it just don’t exist.
Sad thing is, WebOS still exists.
But it’s running on LG televisions
I’ve already commented on other peoples comments but I’ll say it again.
Lineage OS exists and works well with F-droid
With Firefox and unlock origin it’ll remove all the cruft from websites, and you can degoogle your phone, making it more private than it was in 2014 (unless you install apps that don’t respect your privacy)
Is fair phone (review) that? Its camera and battery are sub-par for the money, but it says that it makes up for it in many ways, like longevity and ability to swap out components that in other phones can mean almost getting a new one. It sounds kinda perfect for my use case but I’ve never owned one so can’t be positive. When my current phone dies, this is something I’ll heavily look into.
I have a Fairphone 5 and it’s… ok. It’s definitely overpriced for its specs but you can’t really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It’s also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that’s why I switched), it’s a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I’ll pull it out of my pocket and it’s mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn’t appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I’ve had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn’t allow you to open the keyboard again. It’s also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that’s probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.
The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don’t expect the polish you’ll get out of a Samsung flagship, you’ll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don’t regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn’t really worth the money.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences - that should definitely help people!:-)
I wonder if they perhaps have some QA issues, so you got a lemon, or maybe the design itself is just that bad. You wouldn’t necessarily know, I’m just musing out loud!:-P
One thing I do want to ask if you don’t mind - b/c I don’t know how to interpret the specs and I no longer trust paid reviewers - is how smooth does it handle? Like, noticeable lags or no? If it is basically a cheapie smartphone for a sub-flagship price, I might even be okay with that but wanted to know before getting into it.
Keep in mind that my basis for comparison is a Galaxy S9. The Fairphone feels smoother and more responsive most of the time, but you do occasionally get freezes and lag spikes, mostly when you try to minimise an app that is currently loading something from my experience. Particularly heavy websites also slow it down sometimes, but pretty rarely.
And I wouldn’t really call the design “that bad”, I was listing off my issues with it, so it might have come across that way, but the majority of the time it works completely fine.
Personally I’m very happy with my fairphone. Knowing I can replace parts when they break is nice. And idgaf about camera as long as it can take a halfway decent picture, so a phone that skimps on camera for less cost is a win in my book
I want to be able to pull up an 80% version of a website on my phone, and have a button to open the full website on my computer for when I get home.
If you use Firefox, you can transfer tabs between your phone and computer.
Dumb phones don’t help you for tickets, boarding passes, tap to pay, etc. those things require strong security, not the latest tech. I’ve got a few teenage kids and even for them it’s not very practical to exist without a smartphone.
I’m starting to miss my iPhone 4
As long as you didn’t hold it wrong.
I got it long after the Antennagate problem got fixed. I believe iOS 4.3 was out when I first bought it.
Was Antennagate fixed? Or did people just learn not to hold it in the wrong place?
I thought it was about physical placement of the antenna, I’d be surprised if a software update fixed it.
I loved my LG v10 and galaxy s5. Those phones just worked and worked great for a long time.
Step 1: Reformat your Android phone
Step 2: Turn on ultra power saving mode (this disables everything in the system except a few apps such as phone and messaging)
Step 3: Never connect to the internet
Et voila. You have a dumb phone.
Now that I’ve seen this… Most of the things people want out of a dumb phone can be accomplished by putting an android on ultra power saving mode. Except physical keyboards.
Where’s the ultra power saving mode? I use Pixel
Or just use Lineage OS with little to no extra apps
I just want a repairable phone with a headphone jack.
throw in a microSD card slot and I’m sold
Not as far as “dumb” per se but I would accept “less smart” in exchange for physical buttons and a removable battery.
The removable battery is achievable by moving to Europe.
I mostly just want a phone that doesn’t want to sell me on new ways to use my phone that I don’t already do. I don’t want a phone that’s constantly trying to get me to use voice search, or try out some AI feature, or a search engine, etc. I have a newer Samsung tablet, and by default holding the power button turned on voice search instead of the power off menu? I fucking hate that shit, it was thankfully changeable but it was annoying that I had to change it back. I literally never use voice search. I fucking hate talking to computers, I’m not talking to a machine unless it’s actually capable of feeling offended if I don’t
B-but if they don’t get better every year, the price will go down!
Not gonna lie, I do miss phones with tactile keyboard buttons. My last dumb phone had a mini qwerty keyboard and I loved that thing.
Absolutely. Sometimes I consider getting a separate Bluetooth keyboard, but I seriously doubt it would be similar enough to scratch the itch. I really miss knowing exactly where all the keys are by feel and typing without looking.
I don’t think major manufacturers ever will make them. We’ll continue to get one-off kickstarter-esque fringe phones that’ll keep the most devout Luddite happy and the rest of us will buy what we are offered whether we want a dumb phone or not.
There is Fairphone,Volla and Pine64.
I know and consider those to be squarely on the fringe.
Prepaid flip phones still exist.
I want a dumb phone that acts as a hotspot for my tablet and other devices.
You can already buy those. They seem to commonly be referred to in online stores as ‘pocket wifi’. Just stick a sim card in them and you can manage their settings through any connected device with a web browser.
What are the chances we get custom built/open source phones?
https://learn.adafruit.com/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-cellphone/overview
This thing comes to mind. It’s not exactly an attractive phone.
Closes one I can think of is, The Fair Phone https://www.fairphone.com
Repairable, not free
Nearly zero
People want these to avoid watching ads and being a guinea pig for their own money.
If something like Maemo was a thing today, would be different.
I want a “dumb” phone that can run signal. Just text, calls and signal. No camera, no other apps. It’s time we split the data honeypot back up in to smaller pieces.
Android Roms are a thing
As the actual headline itself says, this is a niche. The editorialized lemmy headline makes it sound like much more than that. Dumb phones still exist, but not many people choose to buy them
They exist
https://www.thelightphone.com/
https://techless.com/pages/home
I think people say they want them by don’t really want them.
Some of the other comments show that off pretty well. When people say they want a dumb phone they usually want a “dumb” phone that also has X, where X may be their favorite messaging app but it can also be anything else really, like a good camera or support for NFC payments.
The prices are ridiculous
+1 For the Light Phone. Owned both their Kickstarter edition and their latest generation, and makes travel, camping, and more easy when I forward my calls/texts. Great battery life with still some creature comforts we have all gotten used to, smart phone wise.
Dumb phones don’t have all the gooey “track everything we do” goodness in the middle so I doubt it.
The new ones would surely do that.
Exactly. If dumbphones made a comeback, companies would simply achieve it by presenting the user with a dumb UI while the data harvesting would still go on in the background.
I guess there’s the valid argument that you’d be doing less on your phone so there’d be less to spy on, but there’d still be spying, and much of it would simply be shifted to the user’s PC instead of a smartphone. Guess what, spying is rife there too.
The answer to stopping the spying is privacy laws.
dumb phone like flip phone it is still popular in Japan.
Gonna need proof of this.
Nearly everyone I met was rocking iPhones. It was kinda frustrating as a android user.
https://www.docomo.ne.jp/english/product/feature_phone/. they are still on sale and it is still popular for old people and business persons. Hell, even some flip phone model are even water resistant.
