Hacker News Reader

Comment by daviddaviddavid | Hacker News Reader

When Sprint/T-Mobile forced me to get a new flip phone because my Kyocera would no longer be supported, I had to decide between the Alcatel Go Flip, the Cat S22 and a Sonim XP3 Plus. I went with the Sonim and I am very happy with it.

https://www.sonimtech.com/products/devices/xp3plus/

The Alcatel had many bad reviews. The Cat seemed huge and defeated many of purposes I have for having a flip phone in the first place. The Sonim has incredible build quality, no apps, internet works fine. I have no complaints. I haven't tried using Google Maps on it yet, but if that works I will love it even more and ditch my Garmin GPS.

View on HN

I'm also rocking an XP3 Plus! I bought it around September because I was looking to curb my screen time. I ruled out the S22 for similar reasons.

I find that in rare cases I need to bring my old smart phone with me (traveling, mainly) for things like airline tickets, movies on planes, maps in new areas.

Otherwise day-to-day I am exclusively using the XP3. My screen time is now at an average of <10 min per day, and my battery life is between 5-6 days on average.

Super happy with the experience, and I bought back so much more time and sanity by not staring at my phone for hours per day.

What's your experience with group texting? I've been looking for a dumb-er phone, but I need good group texting support to stay in touch with my family. I've tried phones like the Nokia 3310 and Nokia 225 TA-1282, and have been disappointed in the way they handle group texting.

Group texting works fine for me. It auto converts to MMS and sending/replying works as expected. On my old Kyocera, a group text would seemingly send individual texts in a loop over the recipients, which always seemed broken.

The one maddening thing about texting on my Sonim is the KT9 predictive texting. Short, high-frequency function words such as "am", "of", "the", etc always have way decreased preference compared to larger, less common words that start with those substrings. e.g. If I type "amethyst" just one time, that word will always be preferred over the much more common "am".

This experience matches mine. Never had problems group texting. Also find the predictive text a little frustrating (it's also seemingly impossible to reliably type contractions like "I'm"), but not deal-breaking. I see in another comment here that there's an open source T9 Android keyboard [1] that I may try out...

[1] https://github.com/Clam-/TraditionalT9

From what I can tell the XP3 does not support the Google Play Store nor unsigned apps, while the S22 does both.

I got one also but it has a lot of rough edges compared to the Kyocera ones. That and it is larger.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com