Ask HN: Has anyone here dropped smartphones and used a dumb phone before?
I always hear about people doing this but never retrospectives of someone who's done it for a while. I'm considering it myself.
One of the challenges is traveling and transportation, and the solution is mostly just planning ahead.
- If driving to an unfamiliar place, study the map beforehand and print (or write) directions and tape it to the dashboard. For any parts of the route that seem tricky, look at Google Maps' street-level images to prepare for reality. (After 1-2 trips, though, I can usually get there and back unaided.)
- If taking public transit, note down basic timing info and stop IDs. The 5-1-1 phone number is often really helpful has well.
- If traveling internationally, just plan ahead carefully. The specifics here will vary wildly by destination, but for example I went to Germany earlier this year with prepurchased train tickets and was able to get where I needed to go.
Gentoo on Pinephone Pro with T-Mobile.
I absolutely love the hardware privacy switches for the cameras, the microphone, WiFi & BT, headphone jack (enabling UART) and the LTE modem (including GPS) under the back cover.
Just absolutely love it.
Not for the faint of heart but anyone who can build Linux from Scratch can do this.
If they will invent it, it will be nothing like 3310, the dumbphones made in 2020+ are very brittle and they do not have much spare displays on the market as Nokia devices have.
Another good reason could be for utmost privacy. Not perfect but I keep location services disabled except when I need to use it, then turn it off right after. I started doing that for battery life so I can go days without charging and it just became a normal habit.
The one I had most recently was the Sonim XP5, which fit all my requirements (bluetooth connection for music and hands-free, mp3 player, no apps) despite running a stripped down version of Android. It was also very rugged. The only thing I didn't care for was the proprietary charger
1) not android based..."dumb OS"...i just want it to make calls on 4g networks. 2) had qwerty.
Until then - grapheneOS on pixel.
i thought about a punkt
but it is android
i want a phone for calls, text messages, uber, email and maps.
that is all i need