I've been looking into the current state of feature phone manufacturing and it's ... really grim. Every feature phone will either be a half-assed nostalgiabait cashgrab (hello, Nokia/HMD), phones obviously aimed at grandmas or the deep and expensive rabbithole of "kosher phones". It's quite depressing actually, considering the companies are obviously capable of still producing great looking feature phones (Philips Xenium series, for example), but there's always some blatant, almost as-if intentional compromise to save a few pennies that completely ruins any potential the phone might have, be it the loudspeaker also acting as the earpiece, horrible software or something else altogether.
I've come to genuinely believe there is some sort of fuckery at play, where phone manufacturers intentionally try and make feature phones look unappealing to drive the sales of smartphones - just think how quickly phones with keypads started being associated with the elderly, where near every single one is made to look absolutely unappealing to anyone with a pair of working eyes, not to mention how horrendous their software and hardware solutions are, even though we had that stuff figured out 20 years ago, yet for some reason all contemporary cellphones have mind boggling solutions in regards to hardware and software...
These are sad times to be a feature phone enjoyer.
