I have a Nokia TA-1386. It’s fine apart from three fatal flaws:

  1. Silent mode also suppresses the alarm, so I have the choice to be woken at 4am by a spam text (sound on) or at 10am having missed my alarm (silent mode).

  2. Every notification is treated the same, I can’t choose to allow some contacts through do not disturb, or even differentiate between contacts and non-contacts.

  3. It has a lovely emergency service buttdial “feature”, where you can call emergency numbers without unlocking the phone. So while being thrown around in my bag, all sorts of buttons get pressed, but as long as 9 gets pressed three times interspersed in there, and then the call button, I get a free call to the police!

Is anyone able to recommend a phone, supported by UK networks, that doesn’t have these problems?

I don’t need anything else apart from calls and texts (e.g. no need for a camera), but some extra nice-to-haves would be:

  • Removable battery
  • Dual-SIM support
  • Long (5+ day) battery life
  • Allow me to copy contact vcards from my laptop in a standard way (no special proprietary software)
  • ambitiousslab@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    I found a solution!

    I generated a silent 3-second mp3 using ffmpeg courtesy of this stackoverflow post. I then copied that onto a microsd and set it as my default ringtone for everything except the alarm.

    Then, I copied over all the vcards from my laptop, and just overrode the ringtone of my special whitelisted contacts. This means that I got exactly the behaviour I wanted: completely silent, except for alarms and close contacts.