Credit card sized phone does nothing but phone calls

boing
22

Somebody should make one of those in an Apple Watch form factor.

7 Likes
23

I don’t know why we still call these things “phones.” Voice chat is like their least important function now.

I propose “commlink.” Sounds nice and sci-fi.

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24

And then only to the hour, because there’s no hurry.

1 Like
25

I get their point, and for people who have no will power or whose friends don’t stop bugging them, I think it would be a great device.

I took have a dumb phone, mainly because I wanted to save cash when my employment situation was dicey, but also because I spend enough time on the internet. I don’t need the phone too.

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26

My mom uses a Jitterbug phone. She’s not afraid of technology, but her vision’s not good enough to use most features of a smartphone, and there are lots of other old people who have good enough vision (at least with glasses) but don’t have good enough hand motion control. She might be able to use more features if she had a 17" smartphone, or maybe a 10" for simple texting. (As it is, I have to get out my reading glasses to do many things on my phone, especially now that it needs an 8-character screen-unlock password as the first step for everything, because $DAYJOB email security requirements don’t like face-unlock or even Swype.)

Jitterbug figured out what market they were trying to address, so their phone shows a small amount of information in big letters, and you can enter your address book into the phone on the web, or telling it verbally to the operator, and if you can’t control the 12-button version there’s a three-button version (operator, hang up, 911), and the screen’s just black&white, none of this 16-million-color auto-aliased text in tiny fonts. (I forget if there’s also a volume control rocker.) (And yes, “use the web” often means “have your kids type in your address list”.)

Back when mom’s vision was better, before my folks got their first Macintosh, she used to put out her community organization newsletter, double-column right-justified, with her manual typewriter. (Make one pass for a draft, then count the letters while you’re making the second copy.) The Mac made that job easier :-), even though she didn’t like the fonts as well.

3 Likes
27

Makes me yearn for the job where I wore a Good G100 email device everywhere I went but didn’t have a cell phone. Those were the days…

28

I prefer a phone with a bit of heft…

I still have one of these. Another got turned into an uplink system for our FM pirate radio station.

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29

Thanks for the Jitterbug tip! Very timely for my mom’s situation right now.

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30

You carry condoms around? I never bother. Pretty sure if it becomes an issue, I can just download an app for that.

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31

Looking at it, there’s clearly some kind of grid of numbers on the screen. You can’t kid us, this is some kind of 2048 app, isn’t it? Looks fun, 'cos there’s what looks like a wildcard tile and… a hashtag tile? How does that even?

32

This reminds me of a comment a friend made before the rise of the smartphone: “You know what I love about mobile phones? It’s the only time you hear men boasting that they have the smallest.”

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33

Not any more - have you seen the size of the screens?

34

You want those hideous 2-way pagers back?

http://www.answerexpress.net/i/My%20Pictures/tn_2-way.jpg

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35

for 20-30$ = instant buy. 100$ - not so much

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36

Last summer I bought a feature phone for 20Eur - that included VAT. As ve were leaving for vacation my wifes phone broke down and I dashed to the nearest electronic store and purchased Samsung for 19.99.
$100 pricetag makes this thing a hipster accessory.

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37

Those look pretty cool, actually. I would have wanted one if I’d seen them at the time.

38

Receiving calls on my smartphone is problematic. It doesn’t seem to prioritize the phone app over other apps, so I can’t always answer the call when I was using the smartphone to do something else. And sometimes, receiving a call crashes the phone.

So, my smartphone doesn’t work well as a phone.

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39

Jeejah

1 Like
40

Damn I miss all the good deals.

41

I had one of those back in the way back, the only downside was that you could plug a hands free kit in to it and use it like a “normal” phone. It still rates as one of my favorite form factors, not least because txt’ing was a breeze thanks to a keyboard with slightly more responsiveness than a ZX Spectrum keyboard.