Comment by shiroiushi

>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.