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Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?

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Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?

#1
Last year I shut down all our internet services for everyone in my home (me, my wife and our kids), so that all we have now are a landline and radio, no internet or television or texting or TV or anything. Our lives have become significantly happier since then. We have so much more time to do anything we want, we feel so much less overwhelmed and distracted, and we're starting to live full, active and fulfilling lives.

But we would like to text and make phone calls while on the go, without the constant temptation to be connected to emails, Facebook, and browsers all the time. So I have been searching the web for a month looking for a "dumb phone", a phone that doesn't have anything but text and phone, not even a "home screen". Something like you would see in the 90s. But it just doesn't exist.

Maybe there's no market for it, but maybe there will be one if you make it and market it well. And that's what you guys are good at.

Re: Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?

#6

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/light-phone-2#/

That looks over engineered and still not as simple as it could be. Think of those cell phones in the 90s that had a single line (or two) of spaces for text, and they had no features but calling and texting. That's perfect, it has literally already been invented, it just needs to be resold, and perhaps put in a pretty package again, but not like this. Not like this.

Re: Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?

#8

There used to be dumbphones for elder people with big buttons at retail stores not too long ago (at least at my place). Maybe these aren't advertised on the web. Edit: don't know about US, though

I have seen those at Best Buy, the most popular is called the Jitterbug, which does come with a browser.

Re: Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?

#9

The Alcatel flip phone at Consumer Cellular looks like it's strictly text and phone except for the bit about downloading wallpaper suggests it has some kind of web client inside. https://www.consumercellular.com/Products/813/Details

I have that exact phone and it has a browser built in. It's lower quality than usual but it's good enough to waste a few hours with.
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