Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

I want to jump on this boat. Anybody have a recommendation for a good value dumb phone?

I've had one of these https://www.walmart.com/ip/Consumer-Cellular-Link-II-8GB-Red... since my previous 3G ZTE dumb phone became useless when 3G stopped being supported in my area. It's running a neutered version of android that to the best of my knowledge can't run apps or access the internet but the interface looks and feels very similar to the old Java one running on my ZTE so I think the manufacturer just ported the old ZTE gui to android and slapped it on this one. It's about as dumb (and cheap) as I could find.

No, but I want an eink feature phone capable of sms, voice, maps, compass, reader, and calculator. That would be my ideal everyday device.

Then ... buy one?

https://www.e-ink-info.com/e-ink-devices/mobile-phones

These run Android. I want a feature phone without Android spyware etc.

you can just user it without wifi and mobile data and it will be same experience

This is why no one makes these obscure hardware products. Because the people who want to buy them have a never ending list of hard requirements that you’ll never satisfy.

This looks pretty close: https://www.thelightphone.com/

They are dumb. You can't go very wrong with any of them. I use a Nokia 225 4G. But not because of any scientific reason. That's what the store had in stock when I popped up. It's okay. If your store has it in stock, get it. Otherwise get whatever they have.

Key point here being, if you try to do your own research and get a model that should work with your cell provider, there's no guarantees; they often have weird aspects of vendor or implementation lock built in.

I suspect this is US specific, and I guess your post might be a valuable heads up about this.

(I'm in the EU, and I haven't seen a phone sold here (in a shop) that wasn't compatible with all available providers - to be honest, this problem has never crossed my mind when I bought a phone.)

Dumbphones are 4G. 4G voice service requires VoLTE but mobile operators have to whitelist phone models, the phone has to have the IMS in the internal database... all in all don't expect VoLTE to work. So voice downgrades to 3G. But 3G is being shut down by many operators and more to come. So voice downgrades to 2G, but 2G has a very low limit of concurrent calls, let's say a few dozen. So it's possible that your dumbphone won't work at all.

> But 3G is being shut down by many operators and more to come. So voice downgrades to 2G, but 2G has a very low limit of concurrent calls, let's say a few dozen. So it's possible that your dumbphone won't work at all.

2G is being shutdown too (IIRC, I had a 2G pay-as-you-go phone that stopped working years ago), and it would be surprising to me that a carrier would shutdown 3G before 2G.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM#Discontinuation

It makes sense because many specialised IoT appliances are 2G-only. At least that's the way it's happening in the EU. For example in Spain 3G will be phased out in 2025 while 2G will be phased out in 2030.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Phase_out

There's more to it than that. I had a model where voice would work on both networks but SMS would only work on one. The only contacts app you could use also relied on a proprietary gateway, and took a minute to open on the other network.

Also, updates to SMS implementations eventually broke SMS on the good network.

I tried the Nokia 225 4G. Unfortunately, it saves the SMS and MMS to the SIM card, not internal storage, so you quickly run out of storage for SMS/MMS, and you'll need to constantly delete SMS.

So I switched to the Punkt MP02. It has a lot of other problems, though, but at least those are more passable.

I did also try the Mudita Pure. But it froze on the second day I had it, so I switched back. Edit: My plan is to give the Mudita Pure a fair shot in the future.

I'm generally disappointed in the phone market, smartphone and dumb phone. Maybe I should abandon it entirely and get a landline.

> So I switched to the Punkt MP02

That is one expensive dumb phone.

Not an inaccurate statement, particularly considering all its flaws, but price isn't my primary concern. Indeed, I am willing to pay a premium for a phone that just does calls and text messages, without using the SIM card as storage and has physical buttons.

I was surprised to see feature phones prominently linked on Nokia's site recently.

https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/feature-phones-series

I'm using Nokia 105 for a few years as my only phone with SIM card and can't complain, except that the claimed 27 days of battery life is bogus, it never lasted more than 2 weeks on a single charge.

Check out JoseBriones on YouTube - great dumbphone review channel

Blackberry is suprisingly good even in 2022

Are there Blackberrys you can still use on the US networks with their darned VoLTE whitelists? If so, that's cool!

Well I'm not in the US so I have no idea. But they work in Europe for sure by my experience.

ask google to search reddit for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com