Related question – Is it possible to have two phones with the same phone number? Maybe an iPhone and a flip phone, for example.
Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
21–30 of 224 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#22https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
This might count as a dumb phone for your intended purposes, given how it separates the baseband from the CPU and has killswitches.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#23Stupid question: would that really be better (from a privacy perspective) than a smartphone, without using the "smart" part of it? Arguably by using a dumb phone you would avoid sharing data with either Apple or Google, but you will still share everything (location, phone numbers, who you are calling, etc) with your telco company.
Calling/texting with a dumbphone might actually be worse, from a privacy perspective, than using something like Whatsapp (until Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook).
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#24I used a Motorola FONE for a few years. E-ink display, the most basic basics (single-case text messages, twelve characters at a time). Pretty good battery life, nice form factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#25Oh great question! I have tried asking almost the same thing here[1] with no luck. 8 upvotes, 0 replies. Very curious to see if this thread will get any traction. Personally, I was eyeing Nokia 3310 (relaunched version)[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261955 [2] https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-3310
I bought the 3G version. It was bad. Really bad. I think we've collectivley forgot how much of a UI bump the iPhone was.
I ended up never using it because there wasn't any way of of getting my contacts from my iPhone to it and I'm not spending several hours keying in my contacts.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#26I have the Nokia 3310 and like it. Aside from not being great at receiving multimedia texts, it works pretty well. Also it has Snake, but sadly not the original version.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#27Oh great question! I have tried asking almost the same thing here[1] with no luck. 8 upvotes, 0 replies. Very curious to see if this thread will get any traction. Personally, I was eyeing Nokia 3310 (relaunched version)[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261955 [2] https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-3310
The new 3310 has really bad UX. I bought it for a relative and was very surprised by its non-intuitive menus, settings and navigation.
I was expecting a UI/UX building on the decades of patterns used in most "feature phones" but this seems to be some from-scratch reinvention which did not hit the mark for me.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#28You might consider a WiPhone a few months from now once we're shipping them:
(project preview link) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/338898127?re...
It's intended to be hackable. The base phone is pure WiFi, but there will probably be an LTE add-on.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#29[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is the best “dumb” phone?
#30I've been using the same Nokia 301 since 2013, and I've been content with it, but it's not sold any more so I don't know how much it's worth recommending it. Some notable problems I've had—and there might be similar problems with other non-smart-phones, which is why I think it's worth mentioning them—are:
· It has some size limit (I'm not sure what) on the attachments it can feasibly receive from other phones, and the default photo size for iPhones is larger than that, which means if a family member texts me a photo, I often can't download it. This isn't a big problem for me, because I tell them to email me instead, but it's still present.
· It lacks many newer emoji characters, which is only a problem if I'm texting people who use a lot of emoji, in which case their messages will have a bunch of mysterious blank boxes at the end.
· It has some kind of problem validating newer SSL certs, so the handful of services that do talk to the internet are at this point broken. I don't use any of them, so it's not a problem for me, but if I did, I'd have been out of luck.
I should also add that dumbphones are a real mixed bag when it comes to security. If I wanted to communicate with someone without eavesdropping, then I'm out of luck with a dumbphone: everything is just not-particularly-secure texting and calling. In my own case, I simply don't think of my phone as being a trusted device: that's what my laptop is for. However, if you really want to be security-conscious with your phone, I think the right thing might be to get an Android phone, install LineageOS on it, don't install any of the Google services, and be very limited in what apps you add.