The long battery life of feature phones is fantastic, and I could certainly type faster with T9.
The experience often falls apart when you want to join a group text, book an Uber, get directions etc. There are lo-fi versions of these, but the experience is bad enough to just not be worth it.
I don't have any social media apps installed on my phone, nor do I have my work email set up.
However, it's the 1% that really makes me love having a smartphone. Looking for a place to eat in a new area, needing maps, etc, access to banking in a quick and easy manner.
My car has navigation, so hailing a Lyft is not a thing I do and being constantly connected to social media is not a thing I desire.
The Convoy 2 has whatever Bluetooth was new in 2010 and can stream music to cars, BT speakers, etc. Its removable micro SD card and battery means I've got more storage than most iPhone users* and still only charge it about every other week.
Only Verzion tracks where I am--the phone is innocent, knowing nothing of our post-Snowden society.
Its halves are only a little thicker than an iPhone 6, but it's shorter than an iPhone 5, so it disappears into my pockets.
I really like it and have kept it after briefly trying both of its successors--the Convoy 3 was larger and looked worse, for no discernible reason, and the Convoy 4 is targeted strictly at old people. The 4 is a huge, nasty plastic thing with a slightly-improved camera, on paper, but somehow manages to run slower than the 2. Quite the disappointment.
*Buying music from Bandcamp, Amazon, Beatport, etc. instead of renting music from Spotify means you can listen to music without a 4G connection! Crazytalk, right?
I did make the leap for a nearly a year. The problems you point out are legitimate, and they made me to move back to a smartphone. Hopefully the 3310 fixes some of those bigger issues you point out (eg: group texting) just as a function of being newer.
The market for the 3310 is larger than you think. For one, there are plenty of old people that prefer to have something simple and smartphones are a nonstarter for them. I think we might actually buy two of these for my grandparents, as they're about to move onto our family plan from another provider.
Beyond that, I think a lot of people who walk around with an $800 phone might be interested in spending $50 as an insurance plan, so that if their phone breaks they have a readily available backup, or if they're doing something risky they can have something to take instead. (Of course, that means you can't post photos of your crazy exciting life to Instagram and Facebook while you're experiencing it, so I doubt most people would be interested.)
I personally won't pick one up because it lacks 3G and LTE, and I would never buy a phone that I can't tether to my laptop. I realize the lack of those radios results in the battery life it's able to get, but I'd prefer for it to be disabled by default but still available for when you need it.
I can't be unique in wanting something that's not a candy bar? I've passed peak smartphone - and toned down my app use. I'll accept a few different formats as alternative.
Yet again, after a ludicrously short time, my sealed in smartphone battery was getting tired. I was hoping Blackberry was finally going to make the "obvious" handset change - a Classic with Android. They announced they were exiting handsets instead. The Far East gets a selection of Android flip phones, mostly very expensive premium, never coming near Europe. So I settled on getting a LG V20 when it released as it at least keeps SD and removable battery. Then LG decided EU doesn't get those.
So when my "smart" phone died, I got my old V8 Motorola (The Linux based flip follow on to the v3) out the drawer. It's fantastic. It gets more signal and clearer calls than any smartphone I have owned, and the original (12 year old?) battery gives weeks of standby. It has ergonomics. Of course the camera is awful, and there's next to no storage.
Seriously, give me that form factor with modern storage, Android and keep the a tiny screen that only comes on when you flip open. I don't need a huge screen to run a chat app, or listen to "turn left in 100 yards", or book a taxi. I can't think of a single app I use that needs a 4"+ screen. The miniscule external v8 screen is perfect for notifications and music player use. Should get decent standby life...
Nope, the entirity of global capitalism offers me 23,509 near identical candy bars in a simulation of choice.
I actually just spent some money to repair my 208, because it's the last of these to support 3G as well. I guess I was right not to wait for this one since it doesn't appear to support 3G.
Did they deprecate the J2ME version of Google Maps?
I went back to a feature phone for almost a year, though I had a smartphone in "airplane mode" with me for most of the same time, but I'd just connect that to wifi.
> I don't think the Nokia 3310 would achieve that either.
Probably not. One thing that I couldn't get used to with the feature phone was call quality. It was terrible. I don't know if that's GSM (as compared to what 4G was like on my smartphone) or if that was the build quality of the feature phone (which was a rather cheap phone). But I agree that the 3310 isn't likely to entice many people to take the leap.
Other than that I have no reason to own one and would love to get rid of it. I deleted all my social media accounts, I use normal taxi services and public transport, I memorize directions from my computers and so on. I don't even check my emails on the thing.
That 3310 will definitely be bought and tried to see if it works better than what I have right now.
I loved the 225 for its simplicity and general responsiveness but texting was abysmally slow after entering a few dozen characters: while the phone was recomputing the text layout on each keypress I could almost see the code as it was written by someone who clearly should've read about computational complexity on compsci 101. That was the sole reason I dumped the phone, especially as SMS is one of the main uses for a dumbphone. Battery was great though, and ringer volumes, speakers and the microphone were good. I suspect the new 3310 is pretty much another revision of that phone.
I would pay decent money for an old skool feature phone that:
- is small enough to fit in a tight pocket without me either feeling it in the first place or bending it broke
- doesn't have its back cover, battery, and phone flying in three directions when I drop it one the floor
- has battery life in weeks
- has a simple but usable camera, 2Mpx is enough for taking photos sharp enough for notes
- has blazing fast user interface with absolutely no delays or lag (how hard can it be?)
- its UI has predictable command paths instead of scrollable list and grid views so that I can punch MENU+5+3+2+1 or something similar to dive directly into one particular submenu. This is how you set your phone to silent/vibrate/loud in the good old times, while walking and never looking at the screen for feedback because you just knew what the phone would do.
- Has 3G/4G data and a basic mostly text-based web browser for checking out timetables, locations or opening times if absolutely necessary
- Has a native online map application: Google Maps for J2ME was, if a bit outdated, still decent
- Bluetooth for transferring contacts, audio files, and photos
All these features have been in phones ten years ago, probably earlier. The best phones at the time had probably 90% of the above list, usually by lacking something that wouldn't have been fixed by technology if only smartphones didn't take over.
Some people, including me, need two SIM, so I would not buy a new 3310 (though I had the old one and loved it) for that reason. My current phone however is a dumb dual SIM paid €20 new, and I would not swap it even for the latest iPhone or any costly Android equivalent.