Sad thing is, WebOS still exists.

But it’s running on LG televisions

As long as you didn’t hold it wrong.

I loved my LG v10 and galaxy s5. Those phones just worked and worked great for a long time.

Personally I’m very happy with my fairphone. Knowing I can replace parts when they break is nice. And idgaf about camera as long as it can take a halfway decent picture, so a phone that skimps on camera for less cost is a win in my book

I have a Fairphone 5 and it’s… ok. It’s definitely overpriced for its specs but you can’t really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It’s also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that’s why I switched), it’s a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I’ll pull it out of my pocket and it’s mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn’t appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I’ve had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn’t allow you to open the keyboard again. It’s also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that’s probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.

The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don’t expect the polish you’ll get out of a Samsung flagship, you’ll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don’t regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn’t really worth the money.

If you use Firefox, you can transfer tabs between your phone and computer.

Firefox can do something like this with the “send tab to device”, not sure it is what you want

Sadly not compatible with everything, though. My phone is off the list ☹️

I know and consider those to be squarely on the fringe.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/6187458?hl=en

I do have Bluetooth keyboard for my current phone, but it’s definitely not the same, plus it’s just another thing to lug around

I miss my SonyEricsson P910i

Yeah but this type of story doesn't generate click bait headline.

TCL

not even once

Yep. They even made a new 3310.

proprietary Chinese processor (Unisoc) AND operating system (Mocor), nothx

Repairable, not free

That’s closer to what I was thinking. That is pretty neat though, now we just need to make it smaller and more modular, and I’m not sure of there is a CDMA option as well.

The name is silly but the Galaxy XCover 6 pro checks all those boxes as a new phone. It even has the old style notification light, different colors for notifications.

www.docomo.ne.jp/english/product/feature_phone/. they are still on sale and it is still popular for old people and business persons. Hell, even some flip phone model are even water resistant.

While certainly not the majority, feature phones (known as garakei) enjoy a cult following in Japan.

Bear in mind that feature phones in Japan were a literal decade ahead of smartphones in terms of features. They already had features such as GPS, email, internet browsers latest 90s and early 2000s.

The Mysteries of Japan-Only Phones — sabukaru - sabukaru.online/…/the-mysterious-early-world-of-j…

Can’t also use those as a phone, though, which I think the parent comment was intending.

You can’t use them as a phone though. And dumb phones that do somehow support tethering don’t do so at modern speeds.

This is an interesting interpretation of “achievable.”

Exactly. If dumbphones made a comeback, companies would simply achieve it by presenting the user with a dumb UI while the data harvesting would still go on in the background.

I guess there’s the valid argument that you’d be doing less on your phone so there’d be less to spy on, but there’d still be spying, and much of it would simply be shifted to the user’s PC instead of a smartphone. Guess what, spying is rife there too.

The answer to stopping the spying is privacy laws that put people, and their privacy, above tax-dodging multinationals.

lol, lmao even

I’ve just breathed new live into an old tablet that, because of all the Samsung Bloatware + system app updates was 95+% full all the time even though it only had something like 4 apps I actually installed and used, by replacing its factory Android with LineageOS.

Now, I have an EE Degree and 25 years experience in developing software, including years of Android.

It still took me researching how to do it over the course of two weeks and actually doing it took me 4 hours and was a massive PITA (I literally had to re-install the factory OS just to toggle the “Allow OEM unlocking” option because my first LineageOS installation that looked fine actually went into a boot-loop on first restart), though the result was well worth it.

(BUT, the version of LineageOS I have has a stupid bug and if I wanted to upgrade it to fix it I would have to compile LineageOS myself for my device, since it’s not officially supported - and I used somebody else’s precompiled binary - and I’m not sure if I have the time and patience for it).

This is me with all my experience in related domains and who actually did something similar for my brand new phone a few months ago.

Absolutelly, if you are lucky, have the exact right model, somebody else on the Internet did all the work for you in a nice video, the files you needed hadn’t yet dissapeared from whatever file sharing cloud storage *#%$ they were place in, and you are technologically inclined, it shouldn’t be too hard.

On the other hand, the average person out there doesn’t have the technical expertise to even begin to understand what’s going on and the whole thing would fail on something as basic as not having the right USB drivers on their computer.

All this to say that your expectation about what people in general are capable of doing is wildly of the mark.

I mean, yeah, but that’s a different desire than this article is talking about because they’re more or less talking about flip phones.

Ew, people call you? All my friends text, because they know we are busy adults, I’ll get to the chat when I can get to the chat. Little monster stays on vibration only or complete silence until I decide so. I control the damn thing not the other way around. Everybody who knows me or I give my phone number knows that phone call means someone died, there’s blood everywhere, or the building got set on fire. Nothing else requires phone call level urgency.

If you don’t like being disturbed while driving you should use do not disturb while driving.

I suggested AliExpress because it’s internationally accessible, but I’ve actually bough small cheap phones both were I am now, Portugal and were I lived before, the UK from local eBay sellers and even mobile phone repair shops.

It’s stuff that costs 20 bucks and the reason for that is because the price of the electronics needed for that really is stupidly cheap nowadays as it’s all so heavilly integrated and even in China stuff like circuit board assembly is mostly automated.

Going directly to some seller from China just removes most of the middlemen as well as any brand markups (though the seller is almost certainly a middleman since factories don’t usually sell by the unit, at least not in my experience way back when I had a small business importing and selling electronics).

It’s the same reason why a perfectly good TV Media Box will cost you €35 (including VAT and shipping) even though that thing has to have enough power and memory to run Android and something like Kodi on top of it, which doesn’t apply to a basic mobile phone.

(I’ve actually made my own basic mobile phone a couple of years ago when playing with Electronics, though it wasn’t that practical to use, since it was all stuff hanging from a breadboard and connected to a 2G module ;)

It’s shocking just how huge a fraction of the prices we pay nowadays for consumer electronics in the West are markups.

Sure, more complex and expensive devices it does make sense to get it from a brand (though I would advise against big brands, or at least get something you can put a Custom ROM on, beause of enshittification) even if the quality of no-name-Brand goods from China is actually better than it used to be, because it’s so much money at stake that the risks of scams, bad quality and inexistent support in getting if from random-Chinese-brand make it maybe not such a good idea for products worth hundreds of dollars (which would also favoured by scammers).

Simple mobile phones, however, are not “complex and expensive devices” nowadays and the same companies making €35 TV media boxes or €50 Single-Board-Computers (like the Banana-Pi or Orange-Pi stuff) have enough expertise to make basic phones and the price of those things is pretty low if you’re not expecting similar features as bigger smartphones (i.e. no high resolution screens, not much memory or processing power, no high resolution cameras with good optics) since that’s were most of the parts cost is.

But yeah, I get your point and I myself generally have a maximum price point for the stuff I’m willing to source from there since because of the risk involved, but if you’re after a mobile phone that costs $20, just get two or source it for a bit more from a local seller in a place like eBay to be a bit safe when it comes to replacements.

I think that last bit is more of a ‘what you make of it’ situation, regardless of how smart or dumb a phone is.

Unfortunately the manufacturers want the data and advertising revenue, and they’d only be persuaded to offer an alternative if they made the same amount of money.

If each sale of a $900 smart phone gives them $100 of ad revenue over a couple years, I’d bet my bottom dollar they would charge $200 for the ‘dumb’ version.

i just recently found my dumbphone (samsung intensity 2) from right before I got a glowiephone. It has access to email, apps for facebook, myspace, and twitter, and a web browser plus full slideout keyboard. So whatsapp, banking, and NFC shouldn’t be difficult at all. Only issue is that unless the bank makes a dumbphone compatible version of their webbed sight they’d need to make a unique app for every manufacturor ecosystem instead of the relative ease of one android and ios app to rule them all. Or have an API for the manufacturors to make their own doggone apps.

It’s not about looking at them on that device, it’s about them looking good when viewed on any device, like if I text a photo to my wife and she looks at it on her phone.

I want a device like this to exist, but every single time a company comes out with an e-ink phone, there’s some huge compromise. Usually, it’s the camera.

The reviews of the Jelly series seem to conveniently leave out how it is to type on. I would like that size but I need to be able to type a casual whatsapp message every once in a while or add an appointment to my calendar.

I am considering buying something cheap and (relatively) small from AliExpress to see how that works and if it’s a size I like. I’d hate to spend Unihertz prices only to find out it’s too small for me.

It’s great, but a bit too small and thick (…let me just stop you there), and the design is just not really modern or elegant. I didn’t have problems typing on it, personally. But it’s either the Jelly Star, at 3", or you basically jump straight up to 6" minimum.

Interesting, but taking it a too far to the tiny end - I don’t need a phone I can hide in my prison pocket, just one that fits in my regular ones.
Also Unihertz has terrible software support and doesn’t provide android upgrades for their phones, so it’s already in a sense 7 months out of date - and sadly obscure enough that there isn’t much custom rom development either.

This is a phone that fits in one hand.

This is a phone you can barely hold in one hand, but can’t actually do anything with it because your thumb maybe reaches 25% of the screen unless if you dangle it precariously on your palm.

jfc not everyone is a man

Screen size stops being meaningful when you start comparing phones released years apart - the 5" Shift5me is 141,5 mm x 71 mm, phones around that width have seen screens all the way from the 4.3" of the 2011 Philips W920 to the 6.2" of the 2024 Samsung S24. For reference, the S4 mini was 4.3" at 124.6mm x 61.3mm.

But if that is an acceptable size of a phone, there are still few of those around, thankfully. It’s just about the limit of what I can comfortably handle at all (Pixel 4a currently)

Communication, GPS, web browsing, camera, occasional use as a flashlight, media player, and a multifunction clock. And yeah that’s about it.

Sam.

I’ll take a shot: Life is a disease of chaos that spreading itself across the universe that long forgot about it. In order to survive it must consume itself, but keeps spreading slightly faster and has only recently started to shape its own future.

We as a species? We do it because it feels good for the most part. Nature was cruel and we figured out how to keep the pleasure center of our brain happy, and are trying to do that as efficiently as possible. Evolution is cruel and humans are no exception. When primates are threatened they go straight for the throat and balls to remove all challengers. We as a species can get more together; but greed has tipped the balance. Hard times are here and it will likely take drastic change to correct the scales.

We as a collective individual? As our perspectives and priorities change, there will never be a single answer for an individual at any point in their life, so it’s hard to provide insight to anyone reading. The first task is to get to know yourself, what are you good at, what do you suck at, what’s the most attractive part of your body, what’s your best hairstyle, we are all unique and unless you can honestly answer this, you still have work to do. If you had unlimited cash, what would you do? Keep in mind quit my job is not an answer! Aside from getting bored in a few weeks, the actual point of this exercise is to identify what your priorities are. Would you run an organization to do something? What’s your passion project? It might be to spend it with your family and that’s a great answer for a happy life. Bill Gates went to Africa to help people, Elon Musk bought Twitter so people would talk about him. At the end of the day, your reason for doing it and mine will be different, but you need to find what you can do that will bring you efficient happiness. If it helps; I like chasing a lot of different things and finding the best it has to offer, I also love my dogs. Best of luck in your search.

You still have to deal with the piece of shit taking forever to turn on, and the possibility of it simply dying because any component of the “smart” part died.

At some point smart TV manufacturers are going to catch on and require Internet, it’s only a matter of time

Not EU so I’ll have to wait. It cost me around $40 USD in shipping and taxes just to import a damn Pinecil to Canada, my country is ridiculous.

because steve jobs’ ghost wills it

Have had at least one phone fitting this description. :(

Android, too.

Because if you want wireless charging it’s that or plastic and the latter certainly doesn’t make for a great premium product

So that the manufacturer can charge you to repair it when it breaks

From what I understand about phone design, it allows for the smallest possible design that can still do NFC and wireless charging, while keeping that premium feel.

I don’t give a damn about premium feel, I just want a no-nonsense phone that does what it’s fucking supposed to while still being serviceable.

How is performance? Read spec relatively low.

And no headphone jack

Iirc the Palma doesn’t have a sim slot thus can’t be used as a full fledged phone. The Hisense line of phones (such as the A9 Pro) do have sim slots and run android but I don’t think even they last weeks.

.

true. Though I don’t know how you’d lock it behind biometrics.

Jokes aside, but in Russia, when NFC stopped working on Apple phones, some banks made payment stickers like this.

Although you should be using an RFID blocking case to hold your cards.

If you’d buy the cheapest of the cheapest, you’ll probably get terrible performance. So that sort of works.

🤷🏻‍♂️ true but, I do like having access to social media as addictive as they are designed to be. it keeps me in touch with people, local activism, pop culture