Ask HN: What feature phone do you use and recommend? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What feature phone do you use and recommend?

7 pointsrudy691212 comments

I am struggling to find a good feature phone to buy. Any ideas?

I too recently looked for a dumbphone, open source and privacy-oriented, with a way to communicate using an open standard messenger protocol (XMPP, Matrix) and CalDAV support – so basically either a web browser or a good app store, with decent battery life. I could not find anything, at all, and gave up.

Imo the variety is lousy. There are countless models to choose from, but they all pretty much work the same, come with vendor lock-in, uninstallable apps, integrated Google services and all of that.

I use the cheap new motorola models, currently motorola 2020 model e,

Motorola usually has a model they market as the "best cheap android" phone, usually runs for about $100-$200 dollars. They arent very repairable in design, but is doable as tutorials are offered online, authorized repair shops can fix the phones but it costs about the value of a new device. Parts can be purchased relativly cheaply online if you are up for the challenge of fixing it yourself.

I recently bought an LG Classic Flip. The phone itself was $30, plus about another $30 to start the prepaid plan through Tracfone. I use it for testing phone routing at work.

When I got it, the guy at the store said that prepaid isn't the same as it used to be before smartphones were everywhere. Instead of paying for X number of minutes that carry over, you get X minutes for Y days. Luckily, though, it's still pretty cheap. I just refilled for 90 days of unlimited phone calls for about $20.

I have tried several feature phones:

* Alcatel Go Flip [1] * Nokia 3310 3G [2] * Samsung Rugby 4 [3]

I like the durability of the Samsung phone, but had to replace it because it lacked 4G support.

I tried the Nokia phone for a short time, I believe there is a version that supports 4G, but I could not find one in the United States. I switched to the Alcatel phone because of its support of 4G on T-mobile.

Both the Nokia and Alcatel try to hard to be smartphone-lite, they have web browsers, e-mail, video players, etc. I believe both the Nokia and the Alcatel use KaiOS, which is a fork of Firefox OS, and is buggy and slow. For example, searching my contact list takes 20 seconds to load, and if I start to type a letter to find someone, it often displays the wrong character (12 key typing, 2 = abc, 3 = def, etc.) and breaks the scrolling / list of names.

There are a few that I have been watching, beware they are still in development / crowdfunded.

* Mudita Pure - $335 (e-ink screen, 4G, Polish company) [4] * Punkt MP02 - $350 (supports Signal encryption, 4G, Swiss company) [5] * WiPhone - $140 (Wifi / VoIP only, not true cellular phone) [6]

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/support/public-files/images/alcatel...

[2] https://liliputing.com/2017/02/nokia-3310-gets-reimagined-20...

[3] https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/phones/all-other-phones/sa...

[4] https://mudita.com/products/

[5] https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/

[6] https://www.wiphone.io/index.html

I recall an article about the Punkt phones that they're not all that private. I think that it pinged Google for something or other. Though I cannot now find the article.

Just clarifying in case someone else isn't sure either - by "feature phone", you mean NOT a smartphone, right? Like those old-school flip phones? (e.g. Motorola Razr or something?)

"Feature phone" is the term for cell phones that have limited additional functionality, but aren't as sophisticated or complex as a smartphone. So yeah, it's basically referring to flip phones, Blackberries, etc

BlackBerry phones were smartphones, not feature phones. They were the smartphone to beat when Apple's iPhone and the various Android phones started coming out. They were just business oriented smartphones instead of consumer oriented smartphones (like iPhoneOS and Android devices).

The ones with the pull-out keyboards? I thought they were just well-made feature phones. I could be wrong

Feature phones are pretty much limited embedded OS phones. Rarely with app installation. And almost always camera and text messaging. Maybe web access.

Blackberry devices were more like a proper PDA with phone support.

Yeah, you are correct. Though it depends on what you mean by "app installation." Many feature phones supported Java applets. I had some third-party games on my first Motorola feature phones.

Technically they're the first smartphones. To differentiate, I usually call the two feature phones vs touch phones. The non-smartphones usually don't have internet access.

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