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Comment on Short summary of dumbphone market in 2025

WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

The advantage here is that the underlying browser engine is ran and updated on the server. This helps avoid the KaiOS situation: KaiOS v2 (the last version in Europe) uses Firefox 48 (current version is 137).

there is no advantage there, only disadvantages. a dumb phone is not supposed to have internet features. but this is wholly running in the cloud? that’s a horrible privacy nightmare, and it must also be very inefficient as it places a relatively large load on the network and the company has to run powerful servers that use unnecessarily large amounts power, more than normal dumb phones of the same quantity would

There are some rumors on /r/dumbphones about a WhatsApp CloudFone app which would be big.

yeah it would be so big if I bought a dumb phone because I’m fed up with tech and then I’m forced into facebook services in yet another “innovative” way. pretty sure they would even market it with “end to end encryption” and “security” even though the server sees everything

I get that this approach is not acceptable to the freedom-oriented, tech-savvy demographic on Lemmy, but it looks like this is where the mainstreaim is heading right now.

I really dont get why if so. why does anyone want tiktok and such on a dumbphone? then buy the cheapest smartphone from alibaba or your local telecom company. the entire purpose of dumbphones is to be able to call and SMS, keep a simplistic contact book and that’s it

also, how does it even run a web browser when the whole device has just 128 MB RAM. will the device crash if I load up facebook. com?

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BenchpressMuyDebil@szmer.info ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

buy the cheapest smartphone from alibaba

These feature phones are aimed at people living in countries who don’t have this privilege. If all I could afford is a 20 EUR phone I’d be pretty happy with having the cloud apps that I normally couldn’t be able to use. I’m sure that the executives at HMD don’t ask themselves “are we not violating the definition of the dumbphone?”, they’re trying to make their product attractive to sell the most units. And apparently the ability to watch YT or check cricket scores (the cloud apps), and in the future maybe WhatsApp, are just that.

Though yeah, my post is more about feature phones, not real dumbphones as I wrote in the title.

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- WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  And apparently the ability to watch YT
  
  the ability to watch youtube on a 240x320 screen? at that level, video is heavily compressed. is any text in videos readable? is it possible to discern tools and screws? or is it just a low-level entertainment device effectively?
  
  Though yeah, my post is more about feature phones, not real dumbphones as I originally wrote in the title.
  
  I have to admit I did not recognize a difference between these two. I thought feature phones and dumb phones are the same category.
  
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  - BenchpressMuyDebil@szmer.info ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Here’s a demo of the cloud youtube playing youtu.be/2VPQ_3SAKi0?t=85 It looks tolerably legible to me. Definitely OK for playing music or dunno, watching soccer recaps or tech videos
    
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