Hacker News Reader

I tried a Nokia-in-name-only modern dumbphone (a compact one without the retro styling), and it did what I needed, which was mainly SMS 2FA.

Until a manager for a tempting job wanted to do the first call on the phone. The call quality was so bad, it bombed the interview for me. So I kissed my privacy goodbye, and bought an iPhone.

(I've since switched to a GrapheneOS phone, which works well, with less violating.)

View on HN

What about a dumb phone ensure that call quality is terrible? Could you not have found a better dumbphone if you really wanted to stay with it?

I spent some time looking. There were some pricey "designer" ones, but they generally got poor reviews. Maybe it's easier to do a design-school exercise, than to get the phone guts engineering right. Also, mandatory VoLTE eliminated a lot of high-quality legacy devices that would've worked fine.

Why not consider a smart phone that has good hardware, supports VoLTE and doesn't use Android or Apple? I've been daily driving a Furi FLX1 for over a month now. You can make it as smart or dumb as you like and you can even use it to charge another phone!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com