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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

It's just barely a feature phone at that. If I were in the market for one I might even entertain this, but I think I could get used to sending text messages on a $20-30 flip phone again if I go that route.

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).

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I feel like the more practical version of this is the Apple Watch cellular version. You can do those things easily but stuff like wasting time on IMs or checking emails is cumbersome. Its the ideal device when you want to get away from distraction (you can turn off non essential notification) but still lets you make a phone call or receive one if its important. As well as streaming music.

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 agree.... but unfortunately the Apple Watch cellular is not available in many jurisdictions, including mine :weep:

Can you explain reasoning for that? It is literally phone in shape of the watch.

It doesn’t have a physical SIM card that you swap in, so carrier support is required.

It uses an eSIM and has a limited set of supported frequencies. This constrains its use to specific carriers and regions.

This 100%. I seldom, if ever, carry a phone with me when I leave the house. I finally activated cellular on my Apple Watch and it is liberating. I find it nice for those times the spouse says "pick up bread" when I am out. Otherwise, there is nothing on my phone that I need to use when I am out and about.

The only ‘smartphone’ thing it does in my eyes is WiFi hotspot, simply because I don’t remember feature phones doing that.

My feature phones at least had little time-wasting games built in.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/nokia-6300-4...

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).

KaiOS is Firefox OS is a (not particularly capable) smartphone OS; even if they don't allow other apps to be installed?

My reading of the Nokia phone I linked was that it was a pretty minimal system, so no I wouldn't say that phone was a smartphone. Ever used a system with Windows or macOS running in kiosk mode? Where it's really just an embedded system to let you look up train times or find a book in a library? That's not a general purpose computer anymore, even though it's running on the hardware and OS that would produce a general purpose computer. It has been constrained to the point that it is now a specialized feature computer.

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.

Back in early 00s, some phones would let you tether via Bluetooth.

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).

> I think I could get used to sending text messages on a $20-30 flip phone again if I go that route

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).

My dad has a flip phone, and it's really not usable for sms. Group messages are totally broken, anything multimedia shows up as blank, and it's a total mess.

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.

> 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.

True, you can get a new Kyocera Rally phone for $20 on ebay that has all the features of a 2000's flip phone.

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