Folks who have known me for a while know that a year or so ago I ditched my Android smartphone. The reasons were many, and had some analogs to the reasons I dumped my Facebook account in late 2018, but one of the primary reasons was the Pavlovian instinct to reach for and check my phone every few minutes, in some pathetic attempt to find a sense of meaning and validation among the feeds and notifications.

I eventually landed on the LG Envy (picked up via eBay), a 3G “feature phone” that was designed for calling and texting. It pulls its weight for the most part, but after becoming an elder at church last year and getting included on groups texts on a regular basis, a couple of shortcomings started to become apparent. One is that it simply will not open/read some of the multimedia text replies from other elders using smartphones (and from some of my other friends). The other is that it only has a memory capacity for 50 or so text messages, meaning I have to continually go in and delete old messages so that I can continue to receive new ones.

So I searched for a newer vintage feature phone (with a keyboard of some kind for texting) that might solve those issues. Sadly, there was none to be found. Newer models were either flip phones (without texting keyboards), or smartphones (which make up 95%+ of the more recent phone offerings).

After watching the documentary ‘The Creepy Line’ late last year, I deepened my resolve to steer clear of Google as much as possible, and that includes the Android operating system. So a few weeks ago I capitulated and picked up an old iPhone 4 for $30 off of eBay. It’s old enough (vintage 2011) that there are virtually no apps in Apple’s app store that can run on it, and it’s only 3G, so it fits the bill as a calling and texting device.

The good news is that it works fine for reading multimedia text replies and making/receiving calls. The bad news is that I discovered this week that Verizon (whose network PagePlus – my provider – resells) is dropping support for all 3G phones at the end of 2019, in order to free up the current 3G wireless frequencies for 5G services.

So I guess later this year I’ll need to pick up an older 4G/LTE device. At this point I’m guessing I’d probably go with an iPhone SE, since I’d prefer something relatively small, and I don’t need the latest/fastest model in order to call and text. I sorely wish some manufacturer would step up and make a simple calling/texting device with a QWERTY keyboard for the 4G/LTE network. Though it’s admittedly a niche market, my gut tells me it’s big enough to support the design and manufacturing costs for such a device.