Pine phone Junior, message phone ?

[zetabeta]

Have a search for dumb phones - you may not get all the features you're after in one device, but you can probably get most of them. There are manufacturers targeting seniors (Doro, TTfone, Artfone etc.) that generally have large tactile buttons, high contrast displays, loud ringers and intentionally low feature count. Other segments are small/cheap backup phones, retro phones, rugged ones, and others like the Light Phone II, Punkt MP01 and MP02, and Mudita Pure (assuming it gets delivered) that are probably a bit too high end. A lot of the cheap ones are using KaiOS now so perhaps too googley for you.

The old makerphone was essentially an arduino, quectel GSM module, LCD screen and some buttons. An updated version should be doable.
https://makezine.com/2014/01/09/make-you...cellphone/

when reading stuff around internet and this forum, there is primarily two use cases for basic phones.

technical basic phone: all googoo corporation, worm-eaten-rotten apple, facebook and other's creepyware is removed and features are very limited. usually no data connection at all (volte makes this more complicated).

easy-to-use phone: might be smartphone but have been made easy to use.

most people in this forum do not want the latter. most of us can live with quite complicated devices but we want to control over them and software.

for technical basic phone, relying on gsm (2g) networks is just a bad idea as for the future. even in finland where operators are dismantling umts (3g) networks and gsm networks will have their end as well at some point. practically speaking, voice over lte is mandatory for even technical basic phones. btw, gsm has bad sound quality in most cases.

now, when i know enough about kaios, it has been a little dissappointment. it has good basis for reasonable basic phone with some smartphone feature. it seems that kaios go with facebook and googoo's creepyware first. it might be preinstalled in a way it cannot be uninstalled without rooting.