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Ask Soylent: Feature/Smart Phone Recommendations Needed

posted by martyb on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:33AM   
from the do-the-jitterbug dept.

Rivenaleem writes:

I'm just back from a holiday which included dropping my phone and cracking the screen. The phone is a UMI Super which has served me very well, with the exception of a spotty GPS. However I found myself with a very real problem. The crack was across the top right corner of the screen about 1/2 an inch in from the top. It had the unfortunate side effect rendering the whole right hand side of the screen 1/2 an inch in unresponsive. This prevented me from unlocking the phone with the PIN (the fingerprint scanner on the back worked fine, however I forgot that I had set the phone to shut down during the night and it requires the PIN when the phone wakes up).

This effectively left me without a phone for the remainder of the trip and while I will get the screen replaced and continue to use the phone, I'm also considering getting a backup feature phone, or another smartphone, or when I change phone in the future move to a feature phone entirely.

In examining what I was missing out with the loss of the phone, I realise I only use it to message (the very odd call), Internet, Navigation and Netflix. However, with Netflix now allowing downloading of many shows, I can use a tablet better for this, and I can consider using a phone with hotspot for streaming and messaging.

What feature or smartphones do you suggest as a move away from large flagship devices? I have unlimited 4G data and am living in Ireland. My understanding is that most feature phones are aimed at the older generation (large buttons, loud speakers etc) and not for "I just don't want something that breaks easily" people. Budget is in the 100-150€ range, though I will entertain more expensive devices if the recommendation comes with good reasons.

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Original Submission

• Re:non-iOS Android? Re:non-iOS Android? (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:26PM (1 child)

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:26PM (#551668) Homepage

  I hate to say this, as Jolla was a breakaway from a Nokia project I was part of, and I know lots of people who worked on the project, and I respect those I know enormously, but I think Jolla is mostly unusable crap. It look many of the worst ideas of Harmattan (nokia N9), and managed to make them worse. It has that obsessive "in order to go from selection A to selection B a swipe must be involved" cancer. Which means that when you're trying to pan around maps, or a webpage, you're suddenly in a system menu, as you swiped the app from just too close to the edge. Or vice versa. Want to pan to an adjacent screen, and then you realise you don't actually, so you let go before you have swiped too far? On one screen, you have done nothing, but on another screen, you'll have selected something. The whole UI is set up like some animal-intelligence test - can the user work out what sequence of actions will end up with the desired outcome? Anyway - try it out before you buy one. Were you here, I'd lend you mine for a play, I don't use it. (I didn't buy it, I was "lent" it by a friend who didn't like it either.)

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• Re:non-iOS Android? (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:01PM

  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:01PM (#551865)

  I'm going to back up Phil here, from my perception Jolla is a great bunch of engineers with a great vision, and insufficient financial backing to make it stick. Lack of sufficient financial backing leads to under-developed products that struggle just to ship, much less excel.

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