Looking for a cheap phone that has basic functionality

[EvilKitty]

Important features:

1. Has 3.5mm audio jack
2. Has a SD card slot (or a silly amount of storage and cheap; gl w/ that)
   • Cause paying for data so you can pay for a steaming service while hoping you single is good enough just so you can listen to music is stupid
3. Has working wifi roaming (this is what made my stop using a Samsung S5 (mid 2022), it says it is connected but it does not work)

 

• Technically I could use a USB hub with a flash drive and a 3.5mm usb dac, but that seems silly when it should be built into the phone and would be annoying to deal without outside of using it in the car

Nice to have:

1. physical button i can use for play/pause of music player
2. Quick access to a flashlight on the lock screen
3. camera that takes images that do not look what what i see without my glasses on, preferably better than a $30 point/shoot digital camera from 2005
4. replaceable battery (i charged the battery on the S4 by using a diff phone and strapping the battery to it as the charge port was shot)

i do not care about (w/ phones):

• What OS it is (apple/android)
• USB C / Micro USB
• watching videos
• playing games
• finger print sensors, i am never putting bio-metric data on a phone ever, the thing is just annoying waking the phone up when you pull it out of your pocket anyway

things that have annoyed the %^&* out of me using a S8

• settings to not put apps to sleep do not work, you paused your music app for 30 seconds now you have to unlock the phone again so you can hit play
  • very annoying when you use password unblock and it is not short one, i also hate typing on phones

Use case notes:

• I have been using "BlackPlayer Music Player" cause google music does not allow over 1k songs locally
  • i have near 3k, around 9 days of audio, all i want from a music player is i give it a folder and it plays files from random from it and the sub folders
• i have been using norootfirewall to prevent apps form accessing the internet that have no reason to
• where a normal person gets a day out of there phone i get a week (i was still able to get a day or so out of that S5, given i think it was so bad a load spike could kill it)
• only thing i use a web browser (Firefox focus) for is to load a few bookmarks so i can check the weather and access some DIY home automation
• aside from that the only thing i use on it is google voice and email, and when i say use i mean just read a message or get notified of one, anything else and i use my desktop as 9 times out of 10 it is faster than trying to type on a phone

Why i am bothering to make this post: the screen is cracked on my hand-me-down S8 and the touch has been failing near the top of the phone so my janky workaround for play/pause of music does not work as the part of the screen i need to press does not work

 

to my knowledge even if you get a unlocked phone when you get a service provider they can lock the phone, is that a thing still? assuming my understanding of that was correct (never looked into it cause i do not care about phones, i have only ever used hand-me-down stuff)

 

I do not like phones, i hate using them, and i do not want to deal with them, in my exp they are never worth using over going to a computer where you will be done before you can gen 1/2 though the process on the phone unless you are in a grocery store at the time

[jaslion]

I mean a cheap xiaomi with a jack and done?

 

A redmi 13c is not slow and has a micro sd + jack

[EvilKitty]

i know this is a Chinese brand, if i just get that from amazon will it be English out of the box?

[EvilKitty]

i do not understand the carrier network compatibility junk, the only way i see to know is to have a imei number and put it into the magic black box and see if it says yes or no, i cant really do that till i have the dam thing in hand, i do not care if it is slow i just want to know what my options are for connectivity, in the last 6 months i used data on 2 months they say i used 0.01GB each the UI probably rounded that up

 

i feel like saying screw it phone shopping sucks and just taking a raspberry pi off the shelf and spending a few days making diy case and using it in the car instead of a phone this would solve 90% of my phone usage