Dumbphones

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Here is a phone that just has text, music, and an e ink screen.

Here’s the idea: the upcoming phone has an E Ink color display, a custom operating system with a few built-in apps for things like phone calls, text messages, mobile payments, navigation, music and podcasts, and not much else.

The makers of the phone are based in the UK and say they’ve partnered with a Chinese manufacturer that has experience making phones for global markets.

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I guess this is a similar kind of approach to the Mudita Pure.

I’d love to own something like this, but I find it hard to fathom how I’d be able to do modern life if I used it as a primary driver. I can definitely see a use for it when it comes to going out hiking, or to the pub with friends and wanting to spend more time in the present moment.

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there’s few details on their website, but the reddit thread is is interesting

addressing smart phone addiction, rather than privacy, seems to be their goal, and this is not simply a dumb/feature phone either - it runs a neutered version of Android that apparently can’t be replaced … apparently

there’s also no mention of baseband isolation, so if privacy is a concern, i’d definitely look elsewhere

i’m not seeing the appeal here - seems like one could emulate this concept by simply uninstalling a pile of apps that ship with Android by default

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Another Mudita product got announced: Mudita Kompakt

FOSS OS in the announcement but very scant detail.

I have an original 3310 that I’ve used for pretty similar noise reduction stuff before, and for having a phone in places I’d rather not take my main guy.

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So even without the privacy implications, I agree with @Josh in that despite being an anti-phone phone user, the phone I’m forced to use would not be this.

If I’m forced to use a phone, it should get the job done as quickly as possible so it can go back to being a paperweight. That means, an average phone, but with my usage far below average. After regular usage of a Pinephone for a few weeks (which is nominally a dumbphone), I found I was using it more than my "Smart"phone because it was so unintuitive and needed so much care and had so few features, etc.

I see these dumbphones as gimmicks but I’m probably not the target audience. I still think it’s a neat gimmick…

I might revisit the idea upon a Pinephone 3 or 4.

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Crosscall, a French brand, just launched a new brick feature phone.

Probably a good camping device or vacation phone, but in the end it is the same thing Nokia offers. Mocor OS is very similar to Nokia’s S30+. But, on a positive note, if the device is like their other phones they probably stripped out the bloatware pay-to-play games and links to FB and Twitter.

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When I see things like 10d standby time I can’t help thinking “this is what they (Big Tech) took from us”.

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This is absolutely the best feature of Feature Phones. Japan was probably the last country to move over to Smartphones from flip phones. One of the reasons was that business people needed phones they could rely on for days at a time due to their insane work hours. Smartphones are still greatly lacking in battery life almost 20 years later.

That would be a good innovation.

Japan’s flip phone history is actually pretty interesting… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8npTV13B1s

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This is a deeply fascinating video. It reminds me once again how little of Japanese culture seems to seep out to places like the UK. The idea of there being little idiosyncracies in phone usage that would be deemed unmarketable elsewhere is particularly interesting. It really reminds you of how dominant culture/lingua franca stuff has a tendency to flatten what you engage with; as goes the US as goes the UK etc. etc.

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