Tempted
Addition of 4G makes tethering a cheap tablet to a cheap phone more attractive. I use my bulky, rugged phone with OS Maps app for hiking. Smaller phone in pocket with tethered tablet would give the best of both worlds.
HMD Global has served up another ladle of Nokstalgia*, with one more remake of a classic mid-2000s phone - a 4G-capable rehash of the corporate-tastic Nokia 6300, which first saw a release in 2007. The original Nokia 6300 was a conventional candybar-design handset, and touted features found on premium handsets of the era. …
Text input in a keypad worked surprisingly well after some practice. The touchscreen keyboards are not ideal either. But I always turned off predictive text input, because it does not work so well for Finnish, where words are longer and have complex conjugation. Entering the first few characters gives the system little clue about how it ends.
If only KiaOS supported larger touch screen devices. As If I could get a phone with a 4 or 5 inch touch screen for me it would be a viable alternative to getting an Android or iphone as I don't really use any apps, I just need a phone with a web browser, whatsapp and to do calls and text. I just would be reluctant to do web browsing on a small screen that the candy bar or flip phone have
Because as a totally blind person for whom a flat slab of featureless & haptic-feedback-devoid glass is the absolute *worst* method of entering text, at least the Tap9 gives us buttons to feel, clicky noises to let us know we've pressed something, & we can do the muscle memory to reach for the next letter in the entry without faffing around trying to find it first.
Just you wait until you get old, arthritic, fat fingered, myopic, & your vaunted pseudo-smart phone turns your attempts to type into useless gibberish.
And before you dismiss feature phones as niche, consider that the Chinese buy them by the *millions* because they get the job done, do it inexpensively, & tend to last longer per charge than your average Tsetse fly during mating season at the fish pond.
The battery lasts for a week, it has a fancy blue flashing LED when a text has been received and the neatest trick is when you use it as an alarm clock it fades in the sound, so it doesn't shock you awake but just gently brings you out of your slumber with the tune of your choice. It would be nice if these features were in the new version of the 6300, but when I tried the new 3310 I was disappointed.
My old 6300 is my bedside alarm clock. It is the second best alarm clock I've ever used due to its features like pressing the 4 does a 4 minute snooze, yet non-numeric use the default value which can be set arbitrarily. Too bad I can't put a sim in it to reset its time anymore.
Everyone using 2G and 3G phone today is soon going to find them without any signal. Plans are different between countries but 2G and 3G are going to be gone by 2030. The upgrade of simple mobile phones to 4G and 5G is going to happen because the mobile networks are getting permanent upgrade.
Around 2030 the new standard of 6G is going to be released to the market and then it is going to be 4G and 5G that is going to be turned off.