pinephone will be my next phone, ubports on nexus 5 has been pretty good too.
That said I feel like we're going into this weird place where you have to have a cell phone even though every day i feel like wanting to have one less and less.
That said I feel like we're going into this weird place where you have to have a cell phone even though every day i feel like wanting to have one less and less.
I hear you. I reached that place a couple of years ago.
My current smartphone probably has 2 or 3 years of life left in it, so I'm considering that as a deadline for coming up with an alternate plan. In thinking about it, the main thing I like about having a smartphone is having a personal computer in my pocket. So...
First, I badly want out of the Android ecosystem, so I going to carry a real pocket computer that runs real Linux. That will be my primary device.
I'll supplement that with the dumbest feature phone that I can find that will allow tethering data connections, and use that for texting, backup internet access, and emergency phone calls.
It's not going phoneless, but it's as close to that as I can get without missing out on functionality that matters to me.
Contender: https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/
When I check for an example of a person participating in society (US) without any phone, I come up empty handed. Then try with me to even describe a setup where a person could reasonably participate but not need a phone. I am vaguely certain this is actually not possible (credit/transportation etc). Perhaps the dire wolf citizen of privacy is pulling this off..but what a high bar to set on an entire population, without their informed consent. Similarly it may be an impossibly high bar on regulators to provide a "life doesn't require a phone number" consumer option.
I guess a person could fashion "phone number to email as a service" where you get an unanswerable "phone number" which just forwards transcribed content to an email?
You've just described how SMS works for me under Voip.ms. All messages are available to be replied to via email, and starting conversations from their (albeit imperfect and slightly clunky) webpage or (much better) Android app