If it doest have an interest browser or email or any of that other stuff, what makes this a ‘smartphone’? It doesn’t even have a camera, so you can’t call it a cameraphone.
Isn’t it a feature phone with a touch screen?
Isn’t it a feature phone with a touch screen?
It's capabilities are:
1. Contact list
2. Phone calls
3. SMS (MMS?)
4. Alarms
5. Music
I had all that on an LG flip phone in the mid-00s. Plus basic web capabilities (which was great, I could see where the buses on my bus route were so I knew if it was worth waiting or if I should just hustle on foot).
My feature phones at least had little time-wasting games built in.
A feature phone with wifi hotspot and WhatsApp support. So this is below the baseline of feature phones circa 2020.
> My feature phones at least had little time-wasting games built in.
TBF, I think one of the points of this is to provide basic communication needs without the distracting parts of smartphones that promote time wasting. But it seems to have cut things too far, to the quick as the saying goes. Feature phones already exist and don't cost $300 and have excellent battery life and international support and are more useful than this without going to the extreme of being as distracting and time wasting as smartphones can be (without discipline).
I'd draw the same line between feature phones running a "smartphone" OS and actual smartphones. If you constrain the OS so that it can't run to its potential, at some point you cease to have a smartphone (even if technically it could be). Just like an iPhone isn't really a general purpose computer. It could be, but in practice it is not, because of the constraints placed on the system via iOS and the App Store.
As far as apps - many feature phones had J2ME. There were plenty of games for that, some quite fancy, but also useful apps - e.g. I remember using Bombus for XMPP chats, and there was Opera Mini for web browsing (it didn't actually try to render everything locally, but instead offloaded layout to Opera servers - the phone then got a vector image of the page it could easily render with scrolling & zoom).
Probably a modern flip phone (KaiOS?) wouldn't be so broken, but I don't think you can even get those in the U.S.
You'd just have to buy the phone from overseas (one of Nokia's models for example). For someone that particularly decided they wanted to use that type of phone, it wouldn't be a huge inconvenience.
A flip phone with a slide out keyboard is really nice to type on, such as this LG one: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51BduiWV+rL._AC_.jpg
I've been using the above phone for around 6 years. It's not the best thing in the world but it does the 5 things in your list and typing isn't bad.
Its biggest weakness is if someone sends you a picture you can't really see it, but if you're only occasionally texting and calling that's not a deal breaker. My friends and family know the best way to reach me is through email (which I access on my workstation).
I assume everyone using the OP phone also has a fully featured phone to go with it so the OP product does not seem very compelling.
I like the punkt approach better. Your phone is a phone / access point when you need Internet. It comes with signal for texting but not much else. I think ideally I’d like a camera as well, since that’s not really a distraction. https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/