I don’t want a dumb phone, I want a reliable PDA that doesn’t hallucinate it’s smarter than me. Older android on a current hardware could’ve been the best but it’s not supported anymore by major devs. As a consumer, I don’t understand why that’s the case. I’m not interested in their new design choice or whatever they market it with while bloating the shit out of it, I want a low-powered portable PC to edit docs and browsing the web without eating through 8gb and 6000mah like it’s nothing.
Some new competiton would be nice too. I remember when companies like Palm made their own competent OS. I wouldn’t even mind if Windows mobile made a reappareance. What do people even need anymore except a versatile browser and the ability to play games?
Communication, GPS, web browsing, camera, occasional use as a flashlight, media player, and a multifunction clock. And yeah that’s about it.
And make them with a high-rez multi-touch screen for old screens sucked ass at typing.
Screens suck at typing. Full stop.
It’s true, but it’s no longer a reality. Keyboards now can only happen in dumb phones or some luxury concept phones. It’s against a couple of current paradigms: making phones easily replaceable, incentivizing quick and short-term usage, having full control over UI\UX, maximizing interactive screen’s real estate, making sure you always look at the screen, and, besides that, engineering challenges that are kinda hard by themselves, but moreso they are in a conflict with banning replaceable batteries, holes for headphones and so on. We are out of luck.
Nevertheless, I’d probably do any stupid thing to get the modern version of something akin to that beast.
Dumbphone maybe not. But a Linux phone that is fully functional and eschews the corporate app eco system? Yes please
I admit I would miss tap to pay tho
Stick your credit card under the phone cover and you have tap to pay.
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.
true. Though I don’t know how you’d lock it behind biometrics.
Above 25 or 30 USD (don’t remember exactly) my bank requires me to enter the pin, that’s just as good.
Oh well, that works then.
I thought I would miss pay to tap, but then I realized there’s another device that supports pay to tap. So instead of taking out my phone to pay, I take out my credit card
I want a phone that has an eink display but an ecosystem for apps. I want my battery to last weeks, I want my communications conduits to be dead simple, and I want to be able to run an OTP authenticator on it.
If the thing I’m expected to have becomes highly useful for the things I’m expected to have it for while also interrupting my bad habit tendencies, I think it would be a good fit for me.
Do you want e-ink or would you rather have a Gameboy display? Transreflective LCD can be a lot faster and have better colors. You can even add a backlight
Yes. Make the phone look and be as boring as possible. No more doom scrolling.
This boox palma is a thing… https://shop.boox.com/products/palma not sure how good of a phone it is though
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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.
No.
Next question.
What is the meaning of life? What are we doing it for?
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.
We as a species? We do it because it feels good for the most part.
I think I’m being a human wrong. Everything hurts, I hate everything, and nothing has ever made me feel good.
I’m genuinely sorry to hear that. From my own journey, I recommend trying to find something that you realize is tolerable to fun. Engage in that activity and actually stop to appreciate that you are in that moment. Just absorb how those emotions feel and try to embrace that frame of mind. Often I would get wrapped up in doing something and not appreciate that I was enjoying myself. I would spend my 8 work hours hating my job, getting worked up by the news and wallowing in those emotions and that becomes your mindset. Identifying that change is constant and trying to embrace what you have now creates moments that are worth indulging in. Now I add slurpee runs to project plans just to make my days slightly more enjoyable and novel. They will likely get stuck down, but at the least it’s a softball for someone to roast for a good laugh. But more often than not we take 15 minutes and get a slurpee. Those coworkers are now friends. It took years before discovering I was neuro atypical, don’t be afraid to seek help and see if there is something different about you and if you can do something about it.
I don’t want a dumb phone but I would 100% take a phone with a back that isn’t glass, high repairability, and full control over the OS. Make it THICC and put a big battery too.
So a fairphone? Though it doesn’t provide wireless charging I think.
And no headphone jack
Yeah that was probably the wrong decision, following their mantra. But personally it doesn’t bother me too much. I’m pretty happy with it
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Make repairable phone
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Remove headphone jack and release wireless bud that not repairable (TWS earbud)
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Piss off community
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???
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Profit?
(i know fairbud now better, but was not back then)
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Legit the cheapo plastic screens on the less than $100 phones are the most resilient phones i’ve ever owned
I had a chunk of metal fall on one, and the only thing it did was INDENT the screen, the plastic was soft enough to bend rather than just crack
Sounds like a Librem 5. Am currently typing from one.
How is performance? Read spec relatively low.
Why would the back of your phone be made of glass? Lol, wtf?
Because if you want wireless charging it’s that or plastic and the latter certainly doesn’t make for a great premium product
What? My phone has a metal back and charges wirelessly just fine, even with a case on it.
I van assure you at the very least the part where the coil is situated has no metal backplate. While technically possible to charge wirelessly with a metal back the efficiency of the charging would drop into hell. Unless absolutely not otherwise doable it’s better avoided, not least of all because the back would heat up immensenly when using charging speeds that are remotely useful
I use my phones with a case, so I actually don’t know the difference
because steve jobs’ ghost wills it
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.
So that the manufacturer can charge you to repair it when it breaks
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For now there are Fairphone and SHIFTphone but both only guarantee to work in the EU. They offer very mid hardware but I hear they do actually work.
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.
Wanna to hear worse? In Turkey you can not import a phone with shipping. You have to bring it with yourself and register it with your passport after paying around 1000 dollars.
Wow they really did find a way to make it worse. Impressive.
I’m not 100% sure on this but there is always the possibility your carrier could always block devices it does not recognize. I need to look more into this.
Also, it seems that someone has already started to work on bringing mobile Linux “PostMarketOS” to the new Shiftphone. It’s not even released yet. If it’s officially supported, I’ll have a favorite brand for sure. That kind of software support would be unprecedented (except maybe the Librem as mentioned earlier but their hardware repeatability is much lower).
I want a dumb TV!
You can just never connect your TV to the Internet or make it forget all networks, that works pretty well if you have a console or PC hooked into it that is doing the actual content for it
At some point smart TV manufacturers are going to catch on and require Internet, it’s only a matter of time
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.
In that case you replace the part that died, instead of throwing away everything. (see Hulk meme)
I looked at this when replacing my TV. If you want a nice panel the options are pretty limited, or you have to pay for commercial sets or a projector. I settled on creating separate VLAN for my smarttv and limiting what apps are installed on it and sourcing a blocklist for all its tracking shit.
I thought I wanted a dumber phone. Not a flip phone necessarily, but not a pocket supercomputer. I looked at the majority of options out there and concluded that (ignoring the ones that are basically just running Android) they’re all missing a feature or two I really like, like the Light Phone looks great but I listen to audiobooks on Libby all the time. So then I just decided to delete a bunch of stuff from my iPhone, and then I didn’t get around to that so I still just have the same phone. 🤦♀️
Person: has problem
Person: attempts to fix
Person: fails
Person: attempts band-aid fix.
Person realizes they have no motivation, and just lives with the problem.
This is where we’re at America.
Why? Just download a copy of android without gapps
I want complete control of my technology after I buy it. I don’t want my phone to assume things that I like based on my input. If something goes wrong, I want it to be my fault because I enabled the wrong setting. I also want physical buttons. I miss those so much.
I mostly just want a phone that doesn’t want to sell me on new ways to use my phone that I don’t already do. I don’t want a phone that’s constantly trying to get me to use voice search, or try out some AI feature, or a search engine, etc. I have a newer Samsung tablet, and by default holding the power button turned on voice search instead of the power off menu? I fucking hate that shit, it was thankfully changeable but it was annoying that I had to change it back. I literally never use voice search. I fucking hate talking to computers, I’m not talking to a machine unless it’s actually capable of feeling offended if I don’t
B-but if they don’t get better every year, the price will go down!
I’m not talking to a machine unless it’s actually capable of feeling offended if I don’t
lmao
Most dumb phones aren’t.
Dumb, that is. Virtually all of them have some version of Android or KaiOS or some other full-fat OS cosplaying as something “simple”. Litmus test: does your “dumb phone” come with a map app? A Facebook app? Can you install apps from an external source? If so, you don’t have a dumb phone.
The hallmark of a dumb phone is the lack of an OS that boots. You turn it on, and everything should be instantly and immediately available, loaded from ROM. No boot sequence, no waiting for anything to load.
The only truly “dumb phone” out there - as something “new” and not actually vintage - is the Rotary Un-Phone.
I wouldn’t mind a dumb phone, but I’d need it to have whatsapp at the very least, otherwise I’ll be “that incommunicable weirdo”
I would miss Google maps too.
I’d love a cool gimmicky phone that flips open or whatever, and has a small screen or a really bad frame rate. Just to discourage me using YouTube and social media.
I just don’t know what I would use to navigate around
If you’d buy the cheapest of the cheapest, you’ll probably get terrible performance. So that sort of works.
The problem with dumb phones is that the entire world pushes people towards smartphones. For a lot of adults, it’s really hard to move to a dumb phone.
Have a security system for your house? Need an app. Router? App. Bank? App. Payments? App. Doctor appointment check in? App. Texting? WhatsApp. Fucking menus? App. Refrigerator? Believe it or not, also App.
My bank is so shitty that sometimes the website doesn’t work, but their mobile app does.
You can’t always opt out of using an app. I tried setting up my new ISP’s router last week and it required an app. No other way to do it.
Currently, I’m thinking something like the Jelly Star might be the best compromise. Has maps and other tools, but the tiny screen prevents them from trapping you.
Out of all those I only use WhatsApp, Lemmy and an Internet Browser. I guess a real dumb phone is out of the question for me. Though I could do with something smaller (not too small) and cheaper.
Some of those apps are optional but advertised as if they aren’t. For instance, I’ve yet to encounter a router that actually needs the app to set it up, but most will tell you to do that rather than trying to give you the “old school” instructions.
The issue isn’t that people want dumb phones, like a Nokia 3310.
They want a smartphone that prevents all the the things they don’t like, while still letting them do all the things they do still need their smart phone to do. And in 2024, that’s quite a lot. Some places you can’t even park your car without a phone.
Apparently they just don’t have the willpower to not install the things they don’t like.
I actually don’t get it. Root that thing and you can make it as dumb as you want. People want to press buttons and everything works. But please private and secure. That’s not how it works, not because of the electronics, because of thee greed and people. Nobody wants to learn basic stuff and anything should just work. No. Learn or shut up. Or pay someone who is willing to do it. The “companies” will be as evil as the consumer let them be.
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.
Drop all the corporate inclusions and youll sell more
