Feature phones vs Nokia 215 vs Smartphones

Feature phones are small, battery-savvy and reliable. I mean, really, really reliable. Their batteries easily last for a week. All that in a small case. But smartphones... Most of them feel like you have a laptop in your pocket. The small ones around can get neither the reliability nor the battery life. It's possible to get two days of battery called "impressive" and a lot less RAM than the OS is capable to work with, in other words - a "crash-happy" phone with an addiction to power sockets. I don't see fun in the "it happens" culture of breaking screens and applications. Their constant need for electrical attention... No, please, let me get a good phone instead.

So what about the "ultimate" feature phone Nokia 215. The battery lasts for a week. Never glitched on me yet. But there are just a few itsy tiny problems with it:

• There's no way to enter a contact more than 17 symbols. Doesn't matter how you save it. Write your "Christopher Walken" contact as "Chris. Walken", and "Michelle Stevenson - New York Project Coordinator" as "Mice Stev NYprCrd". The contacts list is extremely poor and featureless. Such super advanced features as different ringtones - of course not.
• There's no way to enter any notes. Lack of a dedicated notepad is fine. Many people write notes as SMS drafts. But to do that here, the sender number is necessary. If you write no number, enter a random number too large, or enter a number already existing in previous drafts, you'll get your draft lost, no questions asked. Wrote something important? Lost it. Something more important? Lost it too.
• The maximum limit on SMS is ridiculously low. Too low to be necessary.

Nokia 215 is the most featureless phone I've seen for 15 years. It feels like they got a few students together, forbid them to learn anything about past feature phones, forbid them to implement features, threatened on their families if they dared to test, ... I mean, seriously, this is not a phone. It's an internal sabotage attempt from Microsoft, I'm sure.

So, maybe stick to a K750i, I've seen new on eBay for less than 100$. It's far from perfect but it isn't a disaster like the Nokia 215 is. Or give up. Learn to tolerate the flimsy ways of the smartphones, sacrifice your mind to "where can I charge my phone?" question, and struggle on. Hurrah.. the excitement.

To put my mind at ease, I did finally try the dreaded smartphone. An almost idle Android sitting in 2G mode with a 1500mAh battery survived for 9 days. And it's certainly full of features and the UI is great. Can't use it much though because the screen eats the battery fast. And it only crashed when I was using a browser, I wouldn't have used in a feature phone anyway. The test phone is huge (Lenovo A660) but, being thinner, it feels much more comfortable than a K750i. It has 512MB RAM and 1500mAh battery, specs I find in actually small smartphones (LG L40). So a small smartphone is a lot nicer to use than a feature phone and has no practical drawbacks to a feature phone, other than the cost. Smartphones just need care to be reliable and have a long battery life, all feasible and easy things. Turn the screen off after use. Don't overuse. Don't run anything in background. There's no addiction to power sockets. No crashing under light use. I've been living a lie. Cries about their battery lives and reliability, which permeate everywhere, have been far exaggerated.

Unfortunately, after a year of use, my smartphone showed its nasty side. The sound it hears from the microphone went bad. And often it decides not to play sound at incoming SMS and calls. If this was after 5 years, time which my K750i took to start glitching, it would make sense. But 1 year, really? Maybe I was unlucky, but I am skeptical once again...