Quote Originally Posted by ToomuchStuff View Post
Besides those options, a third option is something like an Alcatel flip phone (Nokia came back out with a flip, but I think all in this country are grey market phones). It uses KAI OS, which is effectively a modified Android. Flip phones seem to me to be much harder to text on, and that was my upgrade I was planning, since I didn't text on my old $45 a year, prepaid service.
I had one of the retro Nokia 3310s (actually a candy bar phone) for couple of years. Picked it up cheap and we used it when we couldn't find our own phone quickly enough. It felt great in-hand, it sounded good, and it had some bonuses (apps for Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, iirc). The killer was that it was a 3G phone and most carriers in the U.S. are no longer activating 3G phones. Oh, and pressing 7 four times to get one s into a text message.

Carriers are switching to new transmission bands and protocols -- you'll see them advertised as LTE and 5G. Phones that can't use LTE for voice and data will see decreasing amounts of service as carriers repurpose their older gear and antennas for more current bands of service. In the low-volume, low-cost market of flip phones, VoLTE (Voice over LTE) is rare. There are maybe 3-4 flip phones out there (the Alcatel Flip being one of them) which fill the bill. And they cost as much as cheap smartphones which can do far more and offer you a more useful keyboard for messages.