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 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.
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.
I thought I wanted a dumber phone. Not a flip phone necessarily, but not a pocket supercomputer. I looked at the majority of options out there and concluded that (ignoring the ones that are basically just running Android) they’re all missing a feature or two I really like, like the Light Phone looks great but I listen to audiobooks on Libby all the time. So then I just decided to delete a bunch of stuff from my iPhone, and then I didn’t get around to that so I still just have the same phone. 🤦♀️
The problem with dumb phones is that the entire world pushes people towards smartphones. For a lot of adults, it's really hard to move to a dumb phone.
Have a security system for your house? Need an app.
Router? App.
Bank? App.
Payments? App.
Doctor appointment check in? App.
Texting? WhatsApp.
Fucking menus? App.
Refrigerator? Believe it or not, also App.
My bank is so shitty that sometimes the website doesn't work, but their mobile app does.
You can't always opt out of using an app. I tried setting up my new ISP's router last week and it required an app. No other way to do it.
Currently, I'm thinking something like the Jelly Star might be the best compromise. Has maps and other tools, but the tiny screen prevents them from trapping you.
Some of those apps are optional but advertised as if they aren't. For instance, I've yet to encounter a router that actually needs the app to set it up, but most will tell you to do that rather than trying to give you the "old school" instructions.
Out of all those I only use WhatsApp, Lemmy and an Internet Browser. I guess a real dumb phone is out of the question for me. Though I could do with something smaller (not too small) and cheaper.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:-).
Hmm, I do have tap to wake and that is giving me an idea. You can pull down the status bar while the phone is locked and in the bottom right corner there's a power button. So theoretically my leg can double tap the screen, pull down the status bar, tap the power button and confirm. Feels like a bit of a stretch but who knows. I've never had it randomly turn off while I was using it or while sitting on my desk after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's likely it. Weirdly, turning off that feature may not make all that much of a difference, bc it's so incredibly rare, but if you don't need it - like a long press of the power button would do just as well, in the also rare event that you want to turn it off at all - then disabling that feature would give you peace of mind.
Either way, I'm glad I could help by giving you the idea of how to (maybe) fix it!:-)
The frequency of this issue happening probably varies per person like depending on pockets and usage patterns and such. Like nowadays when I go cycling I either put the phone into an attachment on the front of the bike, or after that broke I put it in my backpack, and either way it never randomly turned off. And in my old Nexus where the issue did happen, the headphone jack working to pull the phone up more than it would have done all on its own probably contributed. i.e., for some people it will never be a problem with their patterns, but if it is for you, then presuming that's it, disabling that power-off feature (if you can) should make you much more satisfied!:-)
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.
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)
It’s not about looking at them on that device, it’s about them looking good when viewed on any device, like if I text a photo to my wife and she looks at it on her phone.
I want a device like this to exist, but every single time a company comes out with an e-ink phone, there’s some huge compromise. Usually, it’s the camera.
I used a nokia dumbphone and it was awful. Not awful due do a lack of features, but awful due to how poorly those features are implemented. Kaios is teal garbage.
But the form factor was lovely, and physical buttons are so much more precise and comfortable to use than a touch screen.
The phone that I really want is a small smartphone with physical buttons for typing and navigation. As far as I am aware that is something that is not made these days.
Sometimes I miss my blackberry because it had a keyboard and would read the name of who was texting me as an alert. It also fit in my pocket a lot better and the screen never cracked.
Wish they'd make a new model of that phone. I'd consider getting one if they could manage to not fuck it up with unnecessary features.
I want complete control of my technology after I buy it. I don't want my phone to assume things that I like based on my input. If something goes wrong, I want it to be my fault because I enabled the wrong setting. I also want physical buttons. I miss those so much.
Dumb, that is. Virtually all of them have some version of Android or KaiOS or some other full-fat OS cosplaying as something “simple”. Litmus test: does your “dumb phone” come with a map app? A Facebook app? Can you install apps from an external source? If so, you don’t have a dumb phone.
The hallmark of a dumb phone is the lack of an OS that boots. You turn it on, and everything should be instantly and immediately available, loaded from ROM. No boot sequence, no waiting for anything to load.
The only truly “dumb phone” out there - as something “new” and not actually vintage - is the Rotary Un-Phone.
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.
I'll fuckin do it. How hard can it be to make minimal technology with a decent interface for a demanding market who will all happily pay a little bit of extra upcharge because they don't want the shiny new biz?
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.
I had an LG and a Kyocera back in the day that could do that. They had some small non-connected games. Of course I couldn't do much with the hotspot as this was on 3G.
I don't want a dumb phone, I want a reliable PDA that doesn't hallucinate it's smarter than me. Older android on a current hardware could've been the best but it's not supported anymore by major devs. As a consumer, I don't understand why that's the case. I'm not interested in their new design choice or whatever they market it with while bloating the shit out of it, I want a low-powered portable PC to edit docs and browsing the web without eating through 8gb and 6000mah like it's nothing.
Some new competiton would be nice too. I remember when companies like Palm made their own competent OS. I wouldn't even mind if Windows mobile made a reappareance. What do people even need anymore except a versatile browser and the ability to play games?
It's true, but it's no longer a reality. Keyboards now can only happen in dumb phones or some luxury concept phones. It's against a couple of current paradigms: making phones easily replaceable, incentivizing quick and short-term usage, having full control over UI\UX, maximizing interactive screen's real estate, making sure you always look at the screen, and, besides that, engineering challenges that are kinda hard by themselves, but moreso they are in a conflict with banning replaceable batteries, holes for headphones and so on. We are out of luck.
Nevertheless, I'd probably do any stupid thing to get the modern version of something akin to that beast.
