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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Dumb Phone?
An anonymous reader writes: For those of us who don't need or want a smartphone, what would be the best dumb phone around? Do you have a preference over flip or candy bar ones? What about ones that have FM radio? Do any of you still use dumb phones in this smart phone era? Related question: What smart phones out now are (or can be reasonably outfitted to be) closest to a dumb phone, considering reliability, simplicity, and battery life? I don't especially want to give up a swiping keyboard, a decent camera, or podcast playback, but I do miss being able to go 5 or more days on a single charge.
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I don't especially want to give up a swiping keyboard, a decent camera, or podcast playback
Then you're stuck, or get a tablet.
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It looks like a blackberry, has a real keyboard, and can stay charged for 3-4 days while in use for texting. It has GPS, bluetooth, and web. but really not. I have this phone as a dumb phone...no data plan. It's pretty good.
My parents still have one of these in their house, and it still works fine (even if dialing is tedious):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Since it's around 50 years old and still working, I'd say it's the best dumb phone.
In my experience, Mugen makes the best extended batteries (both in size and performance).
Of course this is not useful if your phone does not have a replaceable battery (e.g. iPhones). But in general any popular phone with a replaceable battery will have extended batteries made for it. You just put the extended fat battery in then use the provided replacement back panel that includes an enlarged area to hold the new fat battery.
I *always* get this for my phones because I get sick of having to remember to charge them.
http://www.mugenpowerbatteries...
I've done a lot of research on this, and the Nokia Asha 501 is the best dumb phone I've found: http://amzn.to/1HncbcC
I purchased it because it was the most smartphone-like phone on which AT&T does not require a data plan (my definition of dumb phone, yours may vary). The battery lasts a few days when using it mostly for music and internet, or a couple weeks (!) when using it for calls only. It's small, but not too small to be useful. With it's built-in WiFi, it's the only dumbphone that I know that will do Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Email, and even a small number of games.
This is not going to touch any iPhone or Android phone by a long shot, but for the price it does pretty well.
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Personally I always like my old Nokia 5190 built like a tank, it made phone calls, and with the Li-ion battery instead of the NiMH it would go almost 2 weeks on a charge. That said I gave up on non smart phones recently as the last time I needed to replace my phone the only non smartphones available at the store were the flip phone model that went to shit on me in 8 months that I was replacing and the display model for a candy bar phone that they were otherwise out of stock of. I don't play "angry flappy craft" or tweet about my latest bowl movement from the stall at work but I do like the ability of my current phone to accept a huge SD card filled with my music and that it can run Navit but other than that one program I could do everything I currently do with a simple dumb phone.
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It's a smartphone with great battery life. 4/5 days to me.
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I got a Samsung in the Ukraine for about $10 US at a phone stand in a mall. Once I figured out how to get it into English instead of Cyrillic, it became the most practical phone for travel that I've ever found. The screen is just old one-color LCD with a backlight. The battery lasts for weeks on a good charge. It sends old fashioned texts and makes phone calls with better sound quality than the fancy Android I use now. And I never have to deal with the whole phone "locking" thing US carriers have, I can just buy a new cheap SIM card wherever I travel.
Exactly. You can't have it both ways. If you want a good camera, then you're firmly in smartphone territory, and recent phones too. Even my 4-year-old smartphone's camera sucks.
What we need to be doing is figuring out how to make our own smartphones that actually work well. The key to this (since we can't build them ourselves obviously) is to back some of the open-source community projects like CyanogenMod (or any better ones, I'm open to suggestions) and get those working well, just like OpenWrt works well for a lot of routers. If you want a good router that doesn't have any spyware or other BS from the manufacturer, you don't *need* to build your own router from the ground up, you just need to find a cheap consumer router that's supported by OpenWrt and install that, and then you're set. We need to do the same for phones.
There's always going to be limitations, however. Phones only come with batteries that are so large, but by customizing the software some of that can be mitigated, by removing all the bloatware and making very stripped-down builds which don't have much running in the background. Obviously, the phone makers and carriers are not going to provide what we want for us, at any price, so if we want this stuff we have to do it ourselves. And, there's already projects in existence with goals much like this, so it shouldn't be that hard to piggyback onto one of them.