Every single time one of these new "minimal", "dumb", "lightweight" phones comes up today it's just marketing wrapped around a kneecapped Android device. I am in the market for something simpler that does nothing more or little else than play local media/audio, read common document/text formats, ordinary SMS, current standard of telephony, and a different OS than Android. I have not seen anything like this yet.
The problem is everyone has a different list of deal breakers that they need in a "dumb" device. It starts off simple, such as calls and texts, but some people want to play music, or get directions from maps, or maybe contact relatives with Whatsapp... Eventually you just end up with a smart phone.
Ideally everyone would just have the discipline to just keep what they need on their phone without trying to fix their problem with an overpriced gimmick that they will give up on after a few months.
Those people don’t actually want a dumb phone. They just don’t want to be spied on. That’s not actually that complicated it just makes other people less rich.
Yes!
Also be in control of my phone, not having to "deactivate" bloat and garbage brought to me with every update and preinstalled trash I can only "deactivate" not uninstall.
I do want a smartphone - just not one that is in full control of corporations considering me not really a customer, but an asset for their main business - advertisement. Or well the alternative, a company that thinks I am too stupid to be in charge of my phone (and also introduces more and more advertisement).
That seems excessive. In many parts of the world, WhatsApp is the default app for texting people (ie the one you use to contact a plumber or a restaurant) and not having it means the phone fails at its most basic requirements.
People tell me this all the time. Yet I've never had a WhatsApp account and I do just fine.
The only problems I've had were a single barber that accepts reservations over WhatsApp exclusively - so I go to the barber two shops over and don't need a reservation. And some women from dating apps refuse to talk on the phone before talking over WhatsApp. That's fine, there are plenty of fish in that sea.
> Every single time one of these new "minimal", "dumb", "lightweight" phones comes up today it's just marketing wrapped around a kneecapped Android device.
Except the Commodore Callback[1], which is based on Linux (SailfishOS). It's pretty minimal and should meet your requirements, in theory.
It was a 302 redirect to http://www.rim.com/careers/ around 2008-2010, according to the Wayback Machine. It could have been around for longer unarchived, of course.
There are an odd much smaller collection new new-gTLD-like earlier ones that were introduced a long time before the recent ones, it's a real odd historical artifact of ICANN.
In Australia it's pretty great: my driver's license can be provided by an app on my phone and legally must be accepted if it is. So between that and NFC payment support, a phone is the only thing I need to remember to operate outside the house.
It's pretty great as long as it doesn't evolve into them no longer printing the cards and requiring use of their app, consequently on one of their approved OSes.
I mean yes but that is a case of the slippery slope fallacy: the existence of a future possible decision does not affect whether a current decision is a good one.
If they try to move in that direction, we can protest it then. Denying ourselves a useful capability now doesn't stop it from happening anyway, nor make it more likely.
I personally live in a country with a large religious population that rejects the smartphone, so thankfully I personally have not encountered a situation where needing a smartphone is vital. However we've seen many people right here on HN mention how some specific vital service - often government or banking - does require a smartphone.
In my HN Threads feed, the very next item is another HN user mentioning how they have difficulty paying for parking spaces without a smart phone, from this very page. Search "and sadly accept the cost of our principles" on this page to find it.
But I have no interest in winning internet arguments. You win, the cookie isn't worth it to me.
We don't, and sadly accept the cost of our principles. What I generally do, is to put on the blinken lights, and try to hurry up. Up to about 20 minutes or so, it generally works alright.
I do too, but I think we're too deep into the duopoly of Android and iPhone now for anything else to succeed. I need 2FA apps, I need my banking app so that I can 2FA the desktop browser banking. I want Audible or some other audiobook option.
I'd love to go back and get a Blackberry, the pre-QNX one, but I think Android is the least-bad option here. We need certain apps, and Android is the only way we'll get them.
Pinephone is close to useless. Fairphone 5 I think is as good as it gets if you want to avoid android. It is annoying though that fairphone 6 is not working with linux.
I think the iPhone mini sold 5-10 million units per year. I don't view that as a flop, and I don't think it merits sarcasm around how "many" people wanted it.
If small phones were a widely popular thing then there would be a company making them successfully or it would’ve been greater than 5% of iPhone sales. An individual company with zero brand power or presence wouldn’t have any decent sales. This is not even considering that the value proposition would be way worse than just buying a slightly bigger and significantly better phone with more R&D put behind it.
The reality is 90% or more of people don’t care about that or even think about it, this sentiment only exists in online tech enthusiast spaces. If you’re in HN you’re as non-representative of the average consumer as one can get.
I think you should always include the iPhone SE in those numbers. It had similar dimensions, was cheaper and even more minimal. If it weren't for the SE, I would have picked a Mini right away.
US GDP is mostly imaginary and not tangible. It's dependent on both international respect for intellectual property laws (reason for the anger toward China), and the natural resources of other lands (that have had their governments blamed by the current administration actively misleading US citizens about provenance of what is needed to sustain American life)
Intellectual property laws being recognized, US fiat currency, etc. vs. the hard value of natural resources of these other countries (that the US would prefer to try to annex and loot since the former is not a base you can build on)
When you're deciding on long term trade and economic policy, are you thinking about fabricated valuations of US tech companies, or whether you have energy, minerals, and food supply that have an actual value attached?
GDP is not "imaginary" or "not tangible" anymore than an accounting statement of profit and loss is imaginary. It is a very real thing but you have some subtle approaches about how you measure things like depreciation or what accounting rules you follow. The fact that a lot of people don't understand this stuff doesn't mean it is arbitrary or has no meaning. There are also huge teams of accountants that spend tens of thousands of hours getting these statistics, and their work is much maligned by the smarmy internet posters who think they know better at how to determine profit and loss.
GDP is just national value added, and was developed in the early 20th century and broadly used during the Great Depression to measure economic activity. It is good at what it does. People have taken it to measure military power, wealth, success, happiness, capability to build a specific thing, fertility, etc. That is the fault of people not understanding what GDP is or what it was meant to measure, it's not the fault of the metric itself, or the carefully developed system of accounting conventions that were developed over a hundred years of refinement.
I really think there should be mandatory accountancy training in universal education to get people to understand this stuff. The millions of hours saved in online arguments alone would make this a good investment.
Having said that, the valuation of tech companies is based on market sentiment, not accountancy rules. I don't pretend to understand how many of the companies on the equities exchanges are valued, they all seem to be too pricey for me. That, too, has nothing to do with GDP.
A lot of this is about resource access, and that can't be magically conjured. You can have all the industry and business you want to put on paper, but this is a tangible concern for Europe where they require these things from a stable and trusted nation with a similar regulatory and political environment.
This trade matter is likely going to require a new type of agreement that has some special privileges not extended in any other case for both parties.
I have such fatigue from listening to the rhetoric and whining from US farmers when enough of their goods are dangerous for consumers and illegal in Canada and the EU.
It's all bad faith from the US trying to run over any market they don't control so they can weaponize control over food supply of another nation later.
I don't mind countries setting their own rules for the food they want to consume, and for sure the EU can be overly bureaucratic.
On the other hand, the US is the only country I've been to where I have purchased milk in a completely sealed plastic container, and it was rancid when I opened it. Upstate New York is proud of their local and organic produce, but they are selling rancid milk in stores like that's a normal thing. That was a shock as a visiting Australian.
I should have known he had views like this. I've heard similar things expressed and I believe this sentiment personally, but I'm happy to know I can add his name and the original quotation to my archives.
This seems to be what Canada and Europe want from each other. Both have interests in repelling other powers that deserve to have their economic and military capabilities weakened, and both seem to be able to help each other on expanding economic base, energy security, food supply, and resource availability/manufacturing capability with existing intellectual and trade property that will distance them from the US MIC.
It was the same way with Australia becoming eligible to enter the Eurovision Song Contest, .. and yet here we are today with that thoroughly normalised.
As stated by Carney, this is not exactly true, but something like this has been expected. From a legal and sovereignty standpoint, EU membership of any kind does not make sense. A novel bloc of nations centered around military and economic cooperation that includes the EU and Canada however, does.
And it's not even "novel" in the sense that this group already exist, except so far it was gravitating around the US, and it might just reorient to gravitate around someone else.
Who knows, maybe after all the doom and gloom the EU might just win by default because the other world powers have become so unattractive the rest of the world rallies around them?
Mostly a semantic concern in the name given the shared interests and concerns both have in a number of things including the Arctic. It's more a "North Atlantic" group of nations view both sides seem to be taking, but you know, without the US.
Portugal is not part of the Benelux. Poland is not part of the Western Union. Ireland is an island. Yet here we are, because we have enough in common that we would rather cooperate than compete.
You could argue even more effectively that it was British by founding and a British colony, with a big influence from the French. And we know what happened with Britain and the EU.
I suppose. America is a much more mixed bag, while Canada at its core is still British, Scottish, and French. Enough cities have a certain sterile and organized appearance more common in Europe than the US. Not sure how else I'd describe it, but maybe Canada is a bit more "monolithic"?
> Canada at its core is still British, Scottish, and French
Have you been to Canada any time in the past few decades? Around half of the population of Toronto, Canada's largest city, is foreign-born. And I promise you it is not predominantly British or French people.
Yes, I'm from here. Toronto is not a reflection of an entire country, and I would not compare Manhattan or a foreign military base as representative of the rest of another country either.
Here are two quotes from Statistics Canada, to provide some food for thought.
"In 2021, more than 8.3 million people, or almost one-quarter (23.0%) of the population, were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in Canada. [...] Just under 6.4 million people born in Canada had at least one foreign-born parent in 2021, representing 17.6% of the total population" [0]
In other words, as of 2021, about 41% of the population were either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent. In large cities where most people live, it is even higher.
And the future does not look any more British or French, either.
"In 2024, more than two in five newborns (42.3%) in Canada had a foreign-born mother (i.e., a mother who was born outside Canada), a proportion that has nearly doubled in just over a quarter of a century (22.5% in 1997)." [1]
"According to Statistics Canada's recent population projections, immigrants could represent from 29.1% to 34.0% of the total population by 2041." [0]
I somewhat liked my Kobo except for how much Rakuten kept getting more aggressive with forcing their environment on me. And then my Kobo decided to wipe and reset itself on its own, losing all of my bookmarks and other data.
You should check out KOReader [1], an OSS alternative interface software for ereaders. I have it installed on my kobo and I couldn't be happier with it.
My grievance is mainly with the overall firmware/software that has such deep control over storage and all. I've tried KOReader and Plato, but it's just replacing the document reader.
Every single time one of these new "minimal", "dumb", "lightweight" phones comes up today it's just marketing wrapped around a kneecapped Android device. I am in the market for something simpler that does nothing more or little else than play local media/audio, read common document/text formats, ordinary SMS, current standard of telephony, and a different OS than Android. I have not seen anything like this yet.
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