That's closer to what I was thinking. That is pretty neat though, now we just need to make it smaller and more modular, and I'm not sure of there is a CDMA option as well.
The name is silly but the Galaxy XCover 6 pro checks all those boxes as a new phone. It even has the old style notification light, different colors for notifications.
While certainly not the majority, feature phones (known as garakei) enjoy a cult following in Japan.
Bear in mind that feature phones in Japan were a literal decade ahead of smartphones in terms of features. They already had features such as GPS, email, internet browsers latest 90s and early 2000s.
You can already buy those. They seem to commonly be referred to in online stores as ‘pocket wifi’. Just stick a sim card in them and you can manage their settings through any connected device with a web browser.
I had an LG and a Kyocera back in the day that could do that. They had some small non-connected games. Of course I couldn't do much with the hotspot as this was on 3G.
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
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?
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.
Exactly. If dumbphones made a comeback, companies would simply achieve it by presenting the user with a dumb UI while the data harvesting would still go on in the background.
I guess there's the valid argument that you'd be doing less on your phone so there'd be less to spy on, but there'd still be spying, and much of it would simply be shifted to the user's PC instead of a smartphone. Guess what, spying is rife there too.
The answer to stopping the spying is privacy laws that put people, and their privacy, above tax-dodging multinationals.
I want a real software dev team for linux phones. I don't have programming knowledge, but I can pitch in for a reoccurring crowdfund to pay them. The Pinephone is nice hardware, but Pine64 has always said that they're leaving the software up to the community.
