This looks really goddamn stupid – like something someone in a sitcom who’s farcically addicted to their phone would buy for an episode, and the running gag is that they increasingly lose their mind because it’s a clunky, barely usable piece of crap.
Maybe its a way for manufacturers to get rid of shitty old obsolete phones.
Just put a shitty ROM on it and call it the “distraction free phone”. Nice way to put a premium price tag on garbage phones.
I guess an old HTC tytn 2 is also distraction free.
“Distraction free.” I’ve seen people buy these typewriter/word processor clusterfucks because they cannot bring themselves to write their book/screenplay/whatever on a device that is capable of accessing Twitter. I wonder about these people sometimes.
A phone though? A “phone” is a multitool. I want to be able to look stuff up wherever I am, I want my music collection with me, I want a capable GPS app.
Why bother with this when dumb phones already exist and are for sale at every grocery store?
The quality of many dumb-phones is dubious, I think we need more options. Alcatel and Mobiwire are just prone to breaking. My Alcatel dumb-phone started to get awful call quality after about 1 year and the keypad didn’t feel 100% consistent, one button had to be held more firmly than others. In the end I had to go back to a smartphone because I needed clearly call quality. On most dumb phones you don’t get VOLTE (HD calling for anyone not familiar) but my problem was worse than not having VOLTE, it was a defective phone.
Well personally this interests me because I’ve been looking for any phone that actually doesn’t include gps. So this is also a bit of a privacy phone isn’t it?
Who is this for?
If you really want a distraction free phone you can get one for less than $100 that can still run Google Maps. There are more capable Android phones for cheaper too.
I want to like this but I have no idea who is going to buy it.
My friend has a budget android phone, I mean so cheap that it’s only on Android version 10. The on-screen keyboard is tiny and it’s kinda stupid. It still has all the apps even though it really shouldn’t.
Kids. Something like a dumb phone.
But for that use I just don’t understand the keypad. It’s completely unnecessary. Make the same thing without the keypad and I might buy one for my kid.
I feel like if my kid was the age that needed this sort of distraction free phone, I’m not spending $250 on it. $100 would likely be my cutoff.
As it is, my teenager has a used iPhone SE I only paid $150 for. (She’s super anti-social network so I don’t really feel bad as she doesn’t spend that much time on it.)
My first phone was a dumb tracphone, didn’t even flip. Iirc it was $5 with a data plan. I kinda miss that thing
At least the price is fairly low. Usually these dumb phones come out at $600-800 USD.
Low? It’s quite expensive imo.
I agree, my comment was somewhat tongue in cheek, I just didn’t put a /s, partially because some of the other “dumb phones” are 3 to 4 times the price. But, like another comment mentioned, a Nokia can be had for less than half of this.
Dumb phones can be had for 20 € to 100 €. Nokia still sells a whole range of models for this.
Of course, but i was more thinking these hipsterish purposefully dumb phones.
I am surprised the price was this low considering it does run Android. Small volume devices targeted at a limited niche will always have some sort of price premium.
“Distraction free”
Just needs keyboard or voice input.
