As someone who carries around a flip phone on purpose, it’s not impossible to live without a smartphone, but it’s getting more challenging.
Ticketmaster now requires a smartphone. You can’t print tickets. Which means I can no longer go to baseball games.
So far, that’s the only thing I’ve found that’s a hard block, but many other things are certainly not designed for the phone impaired.
Which flip phone do you use? I have a Sunbeam Mobile phone which is nice, but I have found it unsustainable in some ways.
That’s actually the model I’m using at the moment. I started out with LightPhone2, but I was frustrated not being able to get images, and I didn’t like the keyboard.
Sunbeam has been ok, but it definitely has problems. For some reason, T9 will always chose a name before any other word. So if I type “Any,” the first two suggestions are “Amy” and “Cox.” I reached out to the devs about this, and they said it’ll “learn” what your most used words are, but it hasn’t done that for me. Also, the keyboard seems to be a bit laggy and misses some keypresses.
It doesn’t help that I also spilled beer on it once which made the touch screen really wonky.
I was thinking about upgrading to a LightPhone3, but there are a few smartphone things I wouldn’t mind bringing back (like Ticketmaster for example). I preordered a Minimal phone, and I’m hoping to lock it down to just messaging, specific apps (like my car key), and no web browser.
I have a Motorola G7 Power that I installed LineageOS on. It was kind of hard to do, but I figured it out finally after some trial and error. If you ever wanted to do something similar and need help, let me know. I feel more comfortable having this versus a googled Android phone, and it is customizable enough that you could dumb it down.
GrapheneOS seems like an ideal choice, but I hate Google and didn’t want to risk buying a used phone off of eBay that was carrier locked. Most people I’ve seen recommend buying an OEM unlocked Pixel new from a store, which I would hate doing. Let Google starve. I feel like Google and Amazon are huge instigators of the social problems around this.