This looks really goddamn stupid – like something someone in a sitcom who’s farcically addicted to their phone would buy for an episode, and the running gag is that they increasingly lose their mind because it’s a clunky, barely usable piece of crap.
“Distraction free.” I’ve seen people buy these typewriter/word processor clusterfucks because they cannot bring themselves to write their book/screenplay/whatever on a device that is capable of accessing Twitter. I wonder about these people sometimes.
A phone though? A “phone” is a multitool. I want to be able to look stuff up wherever I am, I want my music collection with me, I want a capable GPS app.
Why bother with this when dumb phones already exist and are for sale at every grocery store?
The quality of many dumb-phones is dubious, I think we need more options. Alcatel and Mobiwire are just prone to breaking. My Alcatel dumb-phone started to get awful call quality after about 1 year and the keypad didn’t feel 100% consistent, one button had to be held more firmly than others. In the end I had to go back to a smartphone because I needed clearly call quality. On most dumb phones you don’t get VOLTE (HD calling for anyone not familiar) but my problem was worse than not having VOLTE, it was a defective phone.
Well personally this interests me because I’ve been looking for any phone that actually doesn’t include gps. So this is also a bit of a privacy phone isn’t it?
Who is this for?
If you really want a distraction free phone you can get one for less than $100 that can still run Google Maps. There are more capable Android phones for cheaper too.
I want to like this but I have no idea who is going to buy it.
Kids. Something like a dumb phone.
But for that use I just don’t understand the keypad. It’s completely unnecessary. Make the same thing without the keypad and I might buy one for my kid.
My friend has a budget android phone, I mean so cheap that it’s only on Android version 10. The on-screen keyboard is tiny and it’s kinda stupid. It still has all the apps even though it really shouldn’t.
At least the price is fairly low. Usually these dumb phones come out at $600-800 USD.
Dumb phones can be had for 20 € to 100 €. Nokia still sells a whole range of models for this.
Of course, but i was more thinking these hipsterish purposefully dumb phones.
I am surprised the price was this low considering it does run Android. Small volume devices targeted at a limited niche will always have some sort of price premium.
Low? It’s quite expensive imo.
I agree, my comment was somewhat tongue in cheek, I just didn’t put a /s, partially because some of the other “dumb phones” are 3 to 4 times the price. But, like another comment mentioned, a Nokia can be had for less than half of this.
Just needs keyboard or voice input.
