I have tried desmartphoning myself before. The reason was I do not need this expensive device with 1000s of functions and 1 day battery life, Id rather have a simple one that is mostly just a phone. I dont like typing on a phone either, prefer to use the web versions of messenger, whatsapp and signal.
The device I went with before was Nokia 8110 4G. On paper this was everything I wanted. Low price, 1 week battery, love the slidy thing, etc. Unfortunately it had two big downsides: it failed to receive most automated SMS for some reason (eg bank login tokens), and while it had whatsapp it didnt support whatsapp web, forcing me to use the t9 keyboard.
Then covid came and I had to switch back anyway to use track & trace app and other stuff. But now Im thinking again about this, do you have anything to recommend?
Is battery life your main concern? Because privacy-wise, you should assume that any ordinary cell tower call is being recorded, and is less secure than other voice call methods.
Privacy and security are not really important for me here. They are generally, and have guided some of my choices in the past, but I have no will and strength to fight this fight anymore like I used to. For the phone, I just want something that is cheap, practical and works pretty much out of the box. And yes, battery life is super important, all the different background stuff running on modern phones drain the hell out of it, and so do touchscreens.
Best options i can thing of, in no particular order, are the pinephone, a pixel with grapheneos, a light phone, or a feature phone
If you’re on android then you might be able to do a lot of what you want with a custom launcher, if you search “launcher” on fdroid you should find a ton of really solid options
I guess a feature phone would be best, but it would be very nice if the particular model supported at least whatsapp web. Do feature phones run android in general? Nokia 8110 4G OS was AOSP based but didnt support it.
A lack of touchscreen would be a bonus I think, for battery life and practical reasons. Sharing the internet to a laptop so I can write to people is important.
Some feature phones do i think but i don’t know enough about them to have a recommendation, sorry
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i highly recommend a phone with lineageOS and also with microg versus the usual google services.
the tutorial hasn’t been updated in a while, but there are versions compatible with recent versions of lineageOS it seems (i’m using lineage 18.1-20210814-microG-oneplus3)
if you download a custom launcher like Luke Launcher (for android) you can use the greyscale option to make the smartphone less flashy
finding something inexpensive ahould be easy. for simplicity… i would say anything that is supported by lineageOS.
battery life may be tough.
i had an alcatel onetouch and the battery life was great and also very durable.
you could also try the samsung s5 with lineageOS. it’s very cheap. and LOS makes it simple. it has a amoled display but battery life is weak.
there are many affordable phones that offer worthwhile advantages for around $100. but you said you wanted minimal.As someone who just switched from a Lineage OS Galaxy S5, I couldn’t possibly recommend it myself. It hasn’t aged well, including, importantly, in terms of battery life. I just switched to Oneplus 5t, which does much better in terms of battery life and supports a whole range of cellular bands that the S5 simply doesn’t have, resulting in better signals. They’re available on eBay now for little more than $100.
Yeah, minimal as in preferably no touchscreen, no fiddling with the OS, but its got to at least support whatsapp web and able to make a hotspot.
Non-smart phones appear to be called “feature phones” for some reason. I have an Alcatel OneTouch that I’m reasonably happy with. I wouldn’t say I’d recommend it as such, it just… does phone stuff that I want it to do.
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Laptops with 3g SIM slots that run with your fav distro. Sadly they are deactivating umts in Europe and since i’m quite slow reading into new hardware, i mostly use public wlan and <2015 laptops myself.
A library card is not much above 10 € per city per year in the cities i have one.
Nokia seems to be the only major manufacturer from the good old days that still make non-smartphone, and even so the options are limited. I can’t make any recommendation.
