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
While its no excuse for them to do this, I run my LG tv with no internet access for it. And I honestly prefer a “dumb” tv anyway.
Same. My TV has a netflix button and a YouTube button. 10 years ago those would have been Crackle and Joost. Look it up kiddos.
I’ve already commented on other peoples comments but I’ll say it again.
Lineage OS exists and works well with F-droid
Sadly not compatible with everything, though. My phone is off the list ☹️
I can’t use my banking app on lineage and those wonderful folk at the bank have made it so that you cant confirm online purchases without.
You have to make it pass safetynet. Iirc there’s some magisk modules that let you do that
Well, if you can unlock the bootloader you can port it assuming the device manufacture is in compliance with the GPL.
Might be easier to just look into a supported device when the old one breaks.
Yeah I don’t know what any of that means so I’m stuck with good ol’ daddy Samsung for now 😂
Most people can port anything. And most of the ones who can have better uses for their time.
That’s why I said it might be easier to find a device that already has maintainers
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.
I can’t comment on fairphone, but the Discord thing is likely not your phone, it’s Discord or something. The same happens to me randomly on a Pixel 6a.
Never happened on my old phone. Might be some issue with the stock Android then, idk
As a fellow FP5 user, I haven’t come across the issues you’ve mentioned - that said, I did install /e/os pretty much immediately, so perhaps that’s why.
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.
So on a scale of 1-5, responsiveness might be a 4?
About the design, I mean like a poorly-placed power button that is easily triggered (and then whatever confirmation procedure is in place can be performed by your pocket), or the sudden drainage of battery issue could be something about poor Quality Assurance when they pick batteries at the factory to put into the devices prior to shipping them out. Or worse, you could replace the battery and that effect could still happen!?
I had a Nexus 5 that would dial things, like even emergency #s (fortunately I don’t think it would actually do the call, just dial the numbers) while in my pocket - it may have had something to do with turning the screen on while a headphone jack was plugged into it. I replaced the OS for other reasons and that happened to solve that issue as well:-). So I would not turn a phone away for such a thing, especially if there is a software/configuration fix.
But responsiveness is as much due to hardware as software - e.g. if Firefox runs slow b/c it was compiled for and websites (even mobile) designed for higher-end specs.
Yeah, I’d say 4 is about right. And the power button is a bit recessed (it doubles as the fingerprint reader), so it’s really hard to press it accidentally. I genuinely have no idea how it could randomly turn off in my pocket. As for the battery, I’m pretty confident it’s a software issue. It’s only happened twice in the 4 months I’ve owned the phone and a restart fixed it both times.
Thanks for the additional feedback!:-) That does greatly reassure me.
Since you said the phone would come right back on immediately thereafter, it sounds to me like it does not seem connected to the battery issue.
Unless the battery issue wasn’t “really” a discharge but the sensor somehow being tricked into thinking that the battery was dying - in which case the phone likely shut down gracefully rather than risk a brown-out situation, but then when you powered it up later it realizes once again that it has battery.
But in a more normal scenario, if you have either tap-to-wake or if hitting the power button results in a screen prompt confirmation that does not require a fingerprint or PIN, and especially if you were walking or cycling or some such, then the screen likely rubbed up against your pocket lining and managed to cause the proper combination of actions to shut it off. It could not start up an app that way - that would need your login - but turning a device off usually requires lesser security.
Fortunately the latter may be possible to fix with a configuration setting or other software fix:-).
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
That is literally the top feature I am looking for: skimp heavily rather than go all out on the camera, so basically the exact opposite of a Pixel. Whatever amount I pay for a phone - $100-$500 - I want the camera to be perhaps 20% of the price, not well over half as tends to be the case these days. OnePlus especially the “flagship killers” used to be the most similar to that (or at least you didn’t pay the Premium for Pixel while getting significantly lesser specs), but after their cofounder left when they enshittified I simply don’t trust the company to ever purchase anything from them again.
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.
2014 phones also fit in my hand. I miss that size, you can’t even find them now.
I would absolutely love a linux smartphone that didn’t suck.
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.
Firefox can do something like this with the “send tab to device”, not sure it is what you want
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.
It’s probably a mix of both.
I loved my LG v10 and galaxy s5. Those phones just worked and worked great for a long time.
I wonder why companies can’t just make something as good as these again.
This sounds good, but I’m still not downloading Tapatalk…
People want phones that don’t cost $1000+, lack basic features and constantly prey on their personal data. That’s what they want. Some express that by saying they want “dumb phones”, but the first part is the larger driver here.
A big part of the markup is simply the proprietary systems that run the phone. Apple’s restrictive OS, combined with the planned obsolescence strategy for older units, corral their customer base into buying newer models every 3-5 years.
Android’s open system allows for competitor brands to compete alongside the bigger publishers - Samsung and Sony and Lenova and Motorola. But even then, we’ve lost the more modular phone design to a hobbyist-hostile manufacturing strategy that precludes people from swapping out old batteries or doing basic repairs.
This, combined with data providers that try to bake the price of new phones into the subscription service (AT&T, Verizon, and Tmobile all offering “free” phone upgrades on painfully expensive plans) make the industry this extractive rent-seeking mess.
I want those things and I want a phone that’s easy to use, doesn’t constantly advertise to me, and is more of a helpful tool than a distraction.
I think that last bit is more of a ‘what you make of it’ situation, regardless of how smart or dumb a phone is.
Unfortunately the manufacturers want the data and advertising revenue, and they’d only be persuaded to offer an alternative if they made the same amount of money.
If each sale of a $900 smart phone gives them $100 of ad revenue over a couple years, I’d bet my bottom dollar they would charge $200 for the ‘dumb’ version.
I think the distractions are partially a user issue and partially a company issue. Companies make their programs noisy with notifications by default that I only change it once I’ve found it annoying. They also make their program so bloated that they are slow to load and execute. By the time the app loads, I’ve lost my flow and now the tool is a nuisance. My mind is already cluttered. I don’t need tech to slow it down.
I see what you mean. People use their devices at different levels. That may not be the best way to put it.
My meaning is that a portion of the users will be the type to spend a couple hours digging through each setting on a new device to set it to their needs. Another group will use the device with minimal initial adjustments, and tweak things as they find things they don’t like. Then there’s a third group that will almost never open a preferences panel and just use a device by its factory settings, likely to never consider potential improvements to their user experience.
From what you’ve said, I imagine your in that second group. I myself am in the first one I described; I look at the options of any hardware I purchase or software I download before I actually begin to use it.
Unfortunately - in the context of this post - the number of people in that third group I imagine outnumber us by multiple orders of magnitude, and therefore companies with shareholders to appease will always manufacture devices with as much bloat and advertising and invasive data mining as they can be paid to put in.
People want phones that prey on personal data?
Uh, they DO still make dumb phones. And people still buy them.
Yep, 79 year old father in law has a brand new dumb phone with a t-9 keypad, made by TCL. Works perfectly fine.
Yeah but this type of story doesn’t generate click bait headline.
TCL
not even once
Yeah, for around 20-30 euros you can get a cheap Nokia branded phone as far as I’m aware (105 and 106 series for example).
Yep. They even made a new 3310.
proprietary Chinese processor (Unisoc) AND operating system (Mocor), nothx
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.
Or just use Lineage OS with little to no extra apps
Where’s the ultra power saving mode? I use Pixel
Maybe I just don’t have it on grapheneos or something cause I can’t find it
I don’t think people really want dumbphones, I think they just want apps that better support their self-control. Digital Wellbeing on Android is a start, but it’s way too easy to bypass.
I wager some people want “dumbphones”. A phone you open and just dial into without scrolling through apps. A phone with a simple screen that doesn’t just gobble down battery life. So, like, a smartphone could fit this need with the right interfaces available.
I mean, yeah, but that’s a different desire than this article is talking about because they’re more or less talking about flip phones.
I want people to stop thinking that their little quip to me is of the utmost importance. I want people to wait a few hours to tell me something instead of calling me while I’m driving and act insulted when I tell them to hurry up because I’m either driving or pulled over.
If you don’t like being disturbed while driving you should use do not disturb while driving.
I’m a farmer. There’s always the chance the someone is hurt in a field and is calling for help.
Sounds like you need to set better boundaries with people you know. Or block their texts.
Boundaries? Guy is talking about life or death emergencies…
I’m taking about people spamming him with messages when it’s not an emergency.
Ew, people call you? All my friends text, because they know we are busy adults, I’ll get to the chat when I can get to the chat. Little monster stays on vibration only or complete silence until I decide so. I control the damn thing not the other way around. Everybody who knows me or I give my phone number knows that phone call means someone died, there’s blood everywhere, or the building got set on fire. Nothing else requires phone call level urgency.
Phone calls are for urgency and very often I do need to respond quickly. I also expect and am disappointed when people don’t answer calls from me because I only call for urgent matters.
Even if my father knew how to send text messages, his fat, dry fingers can’t use the on screen keyboard.
Speech to text exists.
You’re still over estimating him. He grew up with leaded gas. He still goes out of his way to buy the stuff at airports.
Eh, can’t fault and old guy for loving heavy metal.
I want a dumb TV!
You can just never connect your TV to the Internet or make it forget all networks, that works pretty well if you have a console or PC hooked into it that is doing the actual content for it
You still have to deal with the piece of shit taking forever to turn on, and the possibility of it simply dying because any component of the “smart” part died.
In that case you replace the part that died, instead of throwing away everything. (see Hulk meme)
At some point smart TV manufacturers are going to catch on and require Internet, it’s only a matter of time
I looked at this when replacing my TV. If you want a nice panel the options are pretty limited, or you have to pay for commercial sets or a projector. I settled on creating separate VLAN for my smarttv and limiting what apps are installed on it and sourcing a blocklist for all its tracking shit.
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 that put people, and their privacy, above tax-dodging multinationals.
I had the same take–less going on to exfiltrate.
I want a real software dev team for linux phones. I don’t have programming knowledge, but I can pitch in for a reoccurring crowdfund to pay them. The Pinephone is nice hardware, but Pine64 has always said that they’re leaving the software up to the community.
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.
This is an interesting interpretation of “achievable.”
Nobody is discussion the level on convinience for it, here
Did you have a stroke
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Come again! We act all Mondays and Fridays!
Stronk. The joke is “stronk”.
Dumbphone maybe not. But a Linux phone that is fully functional and eschews the corporate app eco system? Yes please
I admit I would miss tap to pay tho
Stick your credit card under the phone cover and you have tap to pay.
Jokes aside, but in Russia, when NFC stopped working on Apple phones, some banks made payment stickers like this.
true. Though I don’t know how you’d lock it behind biometrics.
Above 25 or 30 USD (don’t remember exactly) my bank requires me to enter the pin, that’s just as good.
Oh well, that works then.
Although you should be using an RFID blocking case to hold your cards.
I thought I would miss pay to tap, but then I realized there’s another device that supports pay to tap. So instead of taking out my phone to pay, I take out my credit card
People don’t want dumb phones. They’re already available and no one buys them.
Some still buy, like me
Yup.
In the 2000s (very young at the time) I sometimes thought about how awesome it would be if we had devices where we could go on the Internet from everywhere.
I do not want the world back where people could only look things up on the Internet from home or work or where there is a desktop computer.
Maybe dumber then
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!
I’m not talking to a machine unless it’s actually capable of feeling offended if I don’t
lmao
I don’t want a dumb phone but I would 100% take a phone with a back that isn’t glass, high repairability, and full control over the OS. Make it THICC and put a big battery too.
Sounds like a Librem 5. Am currently typing from one.
How is performance? Read spec relatively low.
Legit the cheapo plastic screens on the less than $100 phones are the most resilient phones i’ve ever owned
I had a chunk of metal fall on one, and the only thing it did was INDENT the screen, the plastic was soft enough to bend rather than just crack
Why would the back of your phone be made of glass? Lol, wtf?
because steve jobs’ ghost wills it
So that the manufacturer can charge you to repair it when it breaks
Because if you want wireless charging it’s that or plastic and the latter certainly doesn’t make for a great premium product
What? My phone has a metal back and charges wirelessly just fine, even with a case on it.
I van assure you at the very least the part where the coil is situated has no metal backplate. While technically possible to charge wirelessly with a metal back the efficiency of the charging would drop into hell. Unless absolutely not otherwise doable it’s better avoided, not least of all because the back would heat up immensenly when using charging speeds that are remotely useful
I use my phones with a case, so I actually don’t know the difference
From what I understand about phone design, it allows for the smallest possible design that can still do NFC and wireless charging, while keeping that premium feel.
I don’t give a damn about premium feel, I just want a no-nonsense phone that does what it’s fucking supposed to while still being serviceable.
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So a fairphone? Though it doesn’t provide wireless charging I think.
And no headphone jack
Yeah that was probably the wrong decision, following their mantra. But personally it doesn’t bother me too much. I’m pretty happy with it
-
Make repairable phone
-
Remove headphone jack and release wireless bud that not repairable (TWS earbud)
-
Piss off community
-
???
-
Profit?
(i know fairbud now better, but was not back then)
-
For now there are Fairphone and SHIFTphone but both only guarantee to work in the EU. They offer very mid hardware but I hear they do actually work.
Not EU so I’ll have to wait. It cost me around $40 USD in shipping and taxes just to import a damn Pinecil to Canada, my country is ridiculous.
Wanna to hear worse? In Turkey you can not import a phone with shipping. You have to bring it with yourself and register it with your passport after paying around 1000 dollars.
Wow they really did find a way to make it worse. Impressive.
I’m not 100% sure on this but there is always the possibility your carrier could always block devices it does not recognize. I need to look more into this.
Also, it seems that someone has already started to work on bringing mobile Linux “PostMarketOS” to the new Shiftphone. It’s not even released yet. If it’s officially supported, I’ll have a favorite brand for sure. That kind of software support would be unprecedented (except maybe the Librem as mentioned earlier but their hardware repeatability is much lower).
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.
So maybe they could just…not use apps that bombard them with ads? How hard is that?
I just want a repairable phone with a headphone jack.
throw in a microSD card slot and I’m sold
The name is silly but the Galaxy XCover 6 pro checks all those boxes as a new phone. It even has the old style notification light, different colors for notifications.
The issue isn’t that people want dumb phones, like a Nokia 3310.
They want a smartphone that prevents all the the things they don’t like, while still letting them do all the things they do still need their smart phone to do. And in 2024, that’s quite a lot. Some places you can’t even park your car without a phone.
Apparently they just don’t have the willpower to not install the things they don’t like.
I actually don’t get it. Root that thing and you can make it as dumb as you want. People want to press buttons and everything works. But please private and secure. That’s not how it works, not because of the electronics, because of thee greed and people. Nobody wants to learn basic stuff and anything should just work. No. Learn or shut up. Or pay someone who is willing to do it. The “companies” will be as evil as the consumer let them be.
lol, lmao even
I’ve just breathed new live into an old tablet that, because of all the Samsung Bloatware + system app updates was 95+% full all the time even though it only had something like 4 apps I actually installed and used, by replacing its factory Android with LineageOS.
Now, I have an EE Degree and 25 years experience in developing software, including years of Android.
It still took me researching how to do it over the course of two weeks and actually doing it took me 4 hours and was a massive PITA (I literally had to re-install the factory OS just to toggle the “Allow OEM unlocking” option because my first LineageOS installation that looked fine actually went into a boot-loop on first restart), though the result was well worth it.
(BUT, the version of LineageOS I have has a stupid bug and if I wanted to upgrade it to fix it I would have to compile LineageOS myself for my device, since it’s not officially supported - and I used somebody else’s precompiled binary - and I’m not sure if I have the time and patience for it).
This is me with all my experience in related domains and who actually did something similar for my brand new phone a few months ago.
Absolutelly, if you are lucky, have the exact right model, somebody else on the Internet did all the work for you in a nice video, the files you needed hadn’t yet dissapeared from whatever file sharing cloud storage *#%$ they were place in, and you are technologically inclined, it shouldn’t be too hard.
On the other hand, the average person out there doesn’t have the technical expertise to even begin to understand what’s going on and the whole thing would fail on something as basic as not having the right USB drivers on their computer.
All this to say that your expectation about what people in general are capable of doing is wildly of the mark.
