Is battery life your main concern? Because privacy-wise, you should assume that any ordinary cell tower call is being recorded, and is less secure than other voice call methods.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2021
4 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43399 readers
1900 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Privacy and security are not really important for me here. They are generally, and have guided some of my choices in the past, but I have no will and strength to fight this fight anymore like I used to. For the phone, I just want something that is cheap, practical and works pretty much out of the box. And yes, battery life is super important, all the different background stuff running on modern phones drain the hell out of it, and so do touchscreens.
Best options i can thing of, in no particular order, are the pinephone, a pixel with grapheneos, a light phone, or a feature phone
If you're on android then you might be able to do a lot of what you want with a custom launcher, if you search "launcher" on fdroid you should find a ton of really solid options
I guess a feature phone would be best, but it would be very nice if the particular model supported at least whatsapp web. Do feature phones run android in general? Nokia 8110 4G OS was AOSP based but didnt support it.
A lack of touchscreen would be a bonus I think, for battery life and practical reasons. Sharing the internet to a laptop so I can write to people is important.
Some feature phones do i thing but i don't know enough about them to have a recommendation, sorry
i highly recommend a phone with lineageOS and also with microg versus the usual google services.
the tutorial hasn't been updated in a while, but there are versions compatible with recent versions of lineageOS it seems (i'm using lineage 18.1-20210814-microG-oneplus3)
finding something inexpensive ahould be easy.
for simplicity.. i would say anything that is supported by lineageOS.
battery life may be tough.
i had an alcatel onetouch and the battery life was great and also very durable.
you could also try the samsung s5 with lineageOS. it's very cheap. and LOS makes it simple. it has a amoled display but battery life is weak.
there are many affordable phones that offer worthwhile advantages for around $100. but you said you wanted minimal.
As someone who just switched from a Lineage OS Galaxy S5, I couldn't possibly recommend it myself. It hasn't aged well, including, importantly, in terms of battery life. I just switched to Oneplus 5t, which does much better in terms of battery life and supports a whole range of cellular bands that the S5 simply doesn't have, resulting in better signals. They're available on eBay now for little more than $100.
Yeah, minimal as in preferably no touchscreen, no fiddling with the OS, but its got to at least support whatsapp web and able to make a hotspot.
Non-smart phones appear to be called "feature phones" for some reason. I have an Alcatel OneTouch that I'm reasonably happy with. I wouldn't say I'd recommend it as such, it just... does phone stuff that I want it to do.
if you download a custom launcher like Luke Launcher (for android) you can use the greyscale option to make the smartphone less flashy
Laptops with 3g SIM slots that run with your fav distro. Sadly they are deactivating umts in Europe and since i'm quite slow reading into new hardware, i mostly use public wlan and <2015 laptops myself.
A library card is not much above 10 โฌ per city per year in the cities i have one.
Nokia seems to be the only major manufacturer from the good old days that still make non-smartphone, and even so the options are limited. I can't make any recommendation.