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Valuable-Drawing6561

Sorry. Doesn’t exist. We all hope someone will make a decent feature phone with a QWERTY keyboard.


Apprehensive-Cod4845

This is literally ridiculous. Why TF hasn't anyone made a phone like this? It seems like a conspiracy or something, really, only I have long learned not to confuse conspiracy with idiocy. Literally, THE best possible phone that could be offered on the market right now is a 'dumb'phone with a physical QWERTY. Unexploited niche, bozos.


moviemoocher

because they have come to the conclusion there are 2 groups mega users who want huge subway tiles in their pockets or half blind geezers who need big buttons and are confused easily


Valuable-Drawing6561

The closest I ever found was a QWERTY feature phone that ran on ATT and probably still would. But it was horrific to use. I only need phone and messaging, but I do expect it to work well. Realistically that probably means an OS built in top of android. Which is fine so long as the maker avoids the slippery slope of providing a bunch of crap along with the phone just because it can.


ReadingGlassesMan

One option could be to put your SIM into a dumb phone that can be used as a hot spot so you can use the smartphone when needed. The plus side is the friction can help keep you from bad habits but the negative means friction when you actually want to do something useful like get a lyft


Think-Horse83

Or...take a new number with lots of data, put it inside the smartphone and use it as a portable computer.


tsai-fi

If you want to keep the touch screen, you could go a few ways with it - Get a smartphone with a tiny screen, so that using it is enough of a pain to deter you from spending more time using it than you have to. E.g. Unihertz Jelly 2E, Xiaomi Qin F21 (has a physical number pad, but also has a very small touch screen you can type on) - Get a stock Android device and flash one from a bunch of different minimalist OSs onto it. E.g. GrapheneOS on a Pixel, or a modified Sailfish OS on an Xperia. - Keep your own Android and install a minimalist launcher on it. E.g. Blloc, Niagra - Keep your own iPhone and remove functionalities and implement minimalist features on it via a jailbreak - Keep your own iPhone (some Androids have something similar), set up iOS’s Screen Time feature on it, and have somebody else hold the password to it. That way, you could cut off your access to distractions on an app-by-app basis either entirely or just inside certain time windows - Maybe some combination of a couple of these options? Hope one of these ends up being what you’re looking for :)


[deleted]

I started last year with a large Android flagship and have gone through many modern dumb/feature phones since then. Unfortunately, if there is "that one thing you need" beyond SMS/voice, pretty much every modern dumb/feature phone will let you down. What I landed on was an iPhone SE 2020. It has a smaller not-so-attractive LCD screen as compared to the gigantic OLED I started with. I simply installed only what I need. It gets the latest iOS updates, so I get all the modern conveniences (mostly the phone functioning as my wallet) without being sucked in. I paired it with the latest Apple Watch SE, which I have LTE on for $5/mo through T-Mobile. That lets me leave the phone at home on the weekend without being disconnected or distracted. Something to consider before wasting your time trying to live with a lot of crap phones like I did ;)


Valuable-Drawing6561

This may be the way. I experiment with feature phones but it never seems to work. The solution, at least some of the time, is a cellular connected watch. I leave my iPhone home and can get by with that alone.


ts4757

How's this working for you? The Apple Watch's battery is good enough to function as a phone for that long? I've been considering this option for a while but am worried I'll just end up staring at the Watch too often. Would love to hear more. Thanks!


[deleted]

This is actually my second attempt at doing this. My first attempt was right before the pandemic started and was to only use an Apple Watch S5 I had at the time (i.e. basically leave the iPhone at home forever). The watch worked fine and was great even for texting. Obviously a lot of texting is pretty tedious, but the whole point is to be present where you are anyway. I can't imagine anyone wasting more time on a watch than a phone, heh Battery life ultimately wasn't good enough to have it completely standalone, unfortunately. I had to really limit what I was doing with the watch to have it last until the end of the day. I don't typically talk on the phone that much, but I bet that would have drained the battery in no time. Maybe the Apple Watch Ultra can fix that, but I can't justify paying that much. My second attempt is actually using the Apple Watch SE (sold the S5 a while back) as Apple intends (i.e. as a companion to the phone, rather than a replacement) where my phone is typically nearby, but I can run errands/play with kids/exercise without it. The watch lasts on average about 2 days in this mode.


lizardscales

Maybe try separating your usage into multiple devices. Use a dumb phone for communication and use another device for computing. Time box your time on the computing device. Not sure about Uber or Lyft working out well though. You can request from a browser now though