I think I found a 4G dumbphone that's ok

It's becoming increasingly difficult to find a simple phone for calls, and I blame HMD. Attaching the Nokia brand to garbage phones was probably an excellent marketing strategy, but consumers bought into it, allowing HMD to push decent-quality phone companies out of the market. It turns out that slapping reputable names like Nokia 3310 or Nokia 8110 on dime-a-bucket knock-off phones is enough to trigger nostalgia. HMD don't even try to adapt the design or match the color of the original—not to mention the features. The Nokia brand alone appears to be enough to sell.

The problem is that people who review these phones, in fact never use them. They write a quick review - "this cute nostalgic funny looking thing, pbly good for Digital Detox™ or smth" - then get back to their 8 GHz/1 TB RAM Androids.

Then there's r/dumbphones with threads like "Screentime bad - suggest me a simple dumbphone. No unnecessary features! Just WhatsApp, a-a-and Spotify, a-a-and Uber, a-a-and navigation with real-time traffic data, a-a-and dream analyzer, a-a-and mood light that changes color based on stress levels, a-a-and projector... ". This is why overpriced phones like the Light Phone, Mudita and the Punkt exist, leaving even less of a market for reliable, reasonably priced, simple phones.

Because of all that, it's extremely hard to find a phone that just works as a phone. Phones from 2000 are dying breed where I live because 2G is being actively replaced by 4G. You might think there are a lot of modern dumb phones on the market, but most of them, even those produced by Nokia, are 2G. New 4G phones usually come with "updated" software and unremovable pay-per-play games. That wouldn't be as bad; I think I have the willpower to ignore your $4 Racin Attak garbage, but with "evolution," we also get lower-quality software with breaking bugs.

My Nokia 215 4G fails to sync the network time. This results in the call and SMS history being randomized. The fancy thread-like SMS interface is clearly not intended for the screen size. This makes it extremely cumbersome to use. It has no service in places where there is service. It does not work on all advertised network bands. It quietly loses calls and SMS , as I found out the hard way when I missed deliveries. I've gone through multiple recent Nokias, and they all have some kind of fatal flaw. Compared with other cheap knockoffs, though, at least Nokia seems to be malware-free. Yes, noname dumbphones can have preinstalled malware that will quietly drain your account with paid SMS.

Another problem is that 4G feature phones are getting bigger with each model, slowly swelling to a size comparable to smartphones. I really miss how tiny the relatively recent Just 5 Surf was. The reason for their growing size is that it is cheaper to design and produce larger PCBs than smaller ones. This is especially true when the number of devices produced is small compared to the pre-smartphone era.

Marketers hope that by putting a larger screen on devices, you will buy that stupid game or at least launch YouTube Shorts (the manufacturer will get a couple of cents for preinstalling YouTube, Facebook, or other undeletable crapware). Bigger sizes are sometimes falsely justified as being more convenient for seniors, but the screen font size rarely matches what the elderly can comfortably read. Marketers also try to reach "those who cannot afford real smartphones" by introducing bigger screens and features, which is silly because the cheapest smartphones and 4G dumbphones cost around $50.

So after getting fed of Nokia BS , I've ventured on a quest to find a new phone. And I think I found a dumbphone that's ok!