Ask HN: Minimal Phone with Email but no Web Browser?

4 points·twodave··5 comments

As the title suggests, I've been trying to find a minimal phone I can unplug with but still receive email on. Devices the Minimal Phone[0] still have basically a full smartphone OS, and options like the Light Phone[1] don't have a browser, but also don't have an email client.

[0] https://www.minimalcompany.com/

[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii

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You might have more luck by configuring a phone to block all outgoing connections except those needed for email (and whatever the OS needs). Of course you would lose the display of external images in emails.

Email clients need an HTML renderer, and email users generally want links in emails to work, so email without a web browser seems unlikely.

Lastly, you could use a phone with Sailfish OS or the like, where presumably you can freely add and remove anything you want.

KaiOS? It has a browser but no apps so effectively you are unplugged. What about email - it has become complicated since Gmail killed html-version, the phone is barely able to render a regular web-version. Also absence of anything similar to Qwerty makes chatting too hard to be practical. I would be happy to have any phone able to e-mail and having hardware Qwerty.

An option is using a regular phone, disable access to all apps except for the ones that you need, and make a person of trust set the password to reactivate them.

I know Screen Time on iOS allows to do this, and remember reading about people specifically doing this on their iPads to transform them into 21st century typewriters, only white listing their favorite writing app.

You could try Pinephone with SXMo. Its interface more or less discourages mindless Internet usage.

Oh, don't we miss the Blackberry.

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