Comment by shiroiushi 8 months ago
I really don't see the point of a dumbphone: it seems a lot like buying a ham radio and trying to use that for your daily life. Who am I going to talk to with a dumbphone? No one actually does "phone calls" any more using voice calling, at least in my corner of the world. (They do for work, but I'm not in a customer-facing job so I don't.)
Then you end up doing all kinds of android things. I don't want a toaster that is also a casino and a web browser. It needs to be a thoughtless process between the idea of having toast and eating it. "lets have toast", "ahh, nice toast"
These are a good example
https://www.tripsavvy.com/best-digital-translators-4154191
They just translate, no candy crush, no angry birds, no hero wars, no facebook, no push notifications how you've spend 123 minutes per day using your phone. You can take it to the pub and not end up playing hayday, doom scroll twiiter or hey, I can spend the night reading hn, and ohh is it closing time already? Did anyone else have a good time?
The assumption one can be strong enough to not do that isn't supported by the data.
Something like the Light Phone?
The iPhone has a mode, meant for older or less tech savvy people, but could also be used as a means to turn it into a dumber phone.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
That's pretty much what the Sidekick was: https://www.t-mobile.com/devices/sidekick
It was branded as a smartphone but it was from around 20 years ago and it's unlikely anyone nowadays would call it such.
>In the USA -lots- of people use SMS only, and it’s their main communication. You can do that on a dumb phone
This is unique to the US (and probably Canada); elsewhere, everyone uses various chat apps to communicate.
Regardless, if we just ignore everyplace else, the main problem I see here is that texting on a dumbphone is really painful once you're used to typing out messages on a modern smartphone's touchscreen. Sure, they had that T9 system back then, but compared to typing on a modern phone it's a huge step backwards in typing speed and usability. On top of that, the tiny screen size makes it much harder to follow a conversation.
Flip phones now have apps, but very limited. You can totally get a modern flip phone to check your email or play Spotify if you need to, but web browsing and doom scrolling are pretty tough.
There seems to be a hole in the market for a dumb phone that does sms well. Perhaps we can even get rid of phone calls entirely and just have an sms device with a camera.