Love my iodé phone, but still sometimes return to now totally dumb Nokia E71 is great

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Sometimes, when I need just cut all my connection with permanent online and always reachable state, I switch back to my old (like new) Nokia E71. I just love that phone. Its formal glory, shine and polish is just beautiful. And because non of its formal smart functions work anymore, it became just pure dumb phone with call and text capability. And big great real functional keyboard. For pure calling and occasional texting, there is no other device like this old piece of plastic. No doom scrolling, no news articles, no emails, no calendar reminders.. And it has a functional torch to shine on the late night way home, after spending great and uninterrupted day and evening with real people.

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It really is tempting, I have read of the resurgence of “newly manufactured dumb phones” especially for the “digital detox” crowd.

I could be more behind it if there was a secure messaging option. There are those that try to come from this angle of minimal but still can message (and have maps, a few other “essentials”): many like the Mudita Kompact appeal to a lot of this, but as it is really just locked down Android I personally found them to be a bit less desirable than just taking an iodéOS device and removing all the apps and browser, etc. I have a friend with one and then their issue with messaging with iMessage users, need for Spotify and a couple other apps, etc. sort of make the whole thing fall apart a bit for their use case.

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It’s a shame it won’t work on mobile networks in the absence of 2G and 3G. I have an old Nokia E75 sitting unused in a drawer; the slide-out keyboard was nice.

Nowadays I need XMPP functionality, though, because I use JMP Chat (plus a separate data SIM) as my only mobile carrier. (It interoperates with phone networks via internet - wifi or 4G.)

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the mainly features I miss on my dumb nokia are xmpp and a LN wallet to use sats

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@rik Well, the main reason I love E71, is the fact you cannot install anything on it. So even you are tempted, no chance. And that is the beauty. You want to deal with something or someone? Call him/her. Talk with them. That’s it. And mostly, just call them to meet you in person. Even better.

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@Taurus-II JMP chat is an US thing I assume. Looks cool though. In Europe, most of people, unfortunately, use WhatsUp. That I really don’t like. SimpleX is fine by me, but not very common between population.

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Yeah, JMP provides only U.S. and Canada phone numbers (including port-in of existing U.S./Canada numbers), unfortunately. But as it works strictly over the internet, you can use it anywhere in the world if you don’t mind getting and using a U.S. or Canada number.

Agreed about WhatsApp. Sad that it was bought by a privacy-abusive company.

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I didn’t believed it to be datamined and spied by not only owner company, but also by government agencies all over the globe, until I felt it personally. Nothing a no where is safe and free.

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Not even dumbest phone is a solution. The change will occur from new generations. From the morale and just view of the reality.

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Let’s hope it occurs sooner! :+1:

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Which is a shame because the Symbian phones (from Nokia, Ericsson, and Sony Ericsson) were really the first ‘smartphones’, pre-Android, pre-iPhone. I spent several enjoyable years working on the Symbian codebase, and getting it to work the the first Ericsson and Sony Ericsson models (R380, P800 etc.). In terms of battery life, modern smartphones have only just caught up: my Symbian phones would last several days of normal use between charges.

Good memories :slight_smile:

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Sadly, today’s “dumb” phones are frequently just running a version of Google Android under the hood… one that might prevent users from practicing strong privacy controls. (My guess.)

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Some of them. The old “old ones” (long time drawer inhabitants) are OK. Just dumb. Which is a clever thing :grin:

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This can be achieved with iode parental control. All you need to do is set it up and after deleting the browser and any other undesired preinstalled apps, have a friend change the password.

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Here’s an interesting idea: Dumbing down phone as much as possible with Custom ROM | XDA Forums

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Interesting, but already one we have with iodéOS. Its degoogled, you can have only bare bone apps on it and with ADB you can uninstall apps even further. MicroG on board + Aurora and FDroid as well. With all of this you can be minimalistic as much as you wish :+1:t2:

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