9 Flip Phones to Simplify Your Life (On a Budget) - VICE
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Some things were just better with flip phones. Being mostly buttons and not cursed with touchscreens, one could reach over, open it, hit a speed dial button, and tuck it between shoulder and cheek without even glancing at it. Texting was more deliberate because it took longer than on a smartphone, and your eyes weren’t glued to Instagram or TikTok because the apps were mostly navigation and calendar tools. You know, useful things. No fuss, no fluff. In fact, it was flip phones that kicked off the mini-rebellion against smartphones and the trend toward dumbphones.
There’s an annoying tendency for retailers to conflate flip phones, which are essentially old-fashioned dumbphones of a clamshell design, with folding smartphones. Nobody out there in the real world is calling a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 a flip phone, so when we say we’re talking about flip phones, we mean the button-covered, non-touchscreen phones that snap shut with a satisfying, plasticky thock.
Check out our guide to the Best Dumbphones for more delightfully dimwitted phones, including some that straddle the border between dumbphone and smartphone.
Ignoring the fact that back in the flip phone’s heyday, nobody in the US had even heard of TCL, the TCL Classic Flip looks exactly like the phones I remember from my Millennial youth. It’s got the old, familiar T9 typing—you know, where you have to press some number keys two or three times to get a letter typed—but it also connects to 4G LTE.
Back when dumbphones were almost entirely flip phones, and before we had high-tech dumbphones that resembled smartphones cut off from social media, Kyoceras were one of the two brands I saw people wielding most often as they shunned iPhones, Pixels, and Galaxies. The other was LG, in case you were wondering, and they no longer sell flip phones in the US. They’ve gotten a bit harder to find lately, but the Kyocera DuraXV Extreme+ Non Camera is out there if you want one of the originals.
My first phone was a Nokia. It wasn’t a flip phone. It was a button-covered brick, and I still somehow broke it clean in half while horsing around with my friends near my backpack, where it was stored. Man, we were dumb kids. The Nokia 2780 Flip has 512 MB RAM, 4 GB of internal storage, and its MicroSD slot can take a card up to 32 GB, which is plenty more of everything than you truly need in a flip phone.
I was sweet on the Light Phone III, just as its predecessor (the Light Phone II) impressed me. Those are dumbphones that mimic the more function-based tools of a smartphone, with a small monoscale touchscreen. The Light Flip is their take on a proper flip phone with physical buttons, but with 5G and 4G LTE connectivity. It’s delightfully chonky and reminds me of the car phone handsets of the 1990s.
Calling something dumb is normally an insult. Dumb.co straight-up named themselves that, and since its focus is all dumbphones it’d be an honor to call the Dumb Dumbphone 2 a big, ol’ dummy. For $20 you get the phone, and for $16 per month afterward you get the cellular plan. That actually might be cheaper than peanuts.
The catch with the Tracfone Blu Flex is that it’s locked to Tracphone. You can’t take it to another carrier, such as Verizon or Visible. But with the $50 Blu Flex you also get a year of service with Tracfone. That’s a wild deal if you just need a basic flip phone on a basic, nothing-fancy cellular plan.
You can’t take it home yet, but you can pre-order one. The Commodore Callback 8020 is an all-new take on the flip phone from a company you might recognize if you’re into retro gaming. Commodore’s introductory phone is now taking pre-orders for its 24th batch, with an estimated ship date of February–March 2027.
The quirk of the AGM M10 is that it only works on T-Mobile, as Dumb Wireless advises, along with certain sub-carriers using the same underlying network technology, such as Noble Mobile and Dumb Wireless itself. You get a tough flip phone capable of 4G LTE connectivity that’s certified to the MIL-STD 810H standard; that’s a military standard for resisting dust, water, and drops. If you’re a fumblefingers, this one’s for you.
The Sunbeam F1 Pro Juniper has an awesome name. It sounds like it should be some unlockable, Japanese-market-only car in a Gran Turismo game. The Sunbeam works on all major US networks: T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T, along with a number of smaller carriers. At $389, it’s a bit pricey, but it includes a feature suite of Waze navigation, music player, a touchscreen, and both Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity. There’s also the Sunbeam F1 Pro Aspen, which is identical but lacks the Juniper’s support for text-based email. It’s $30 cheaper at $359. So you choose just how connected you want to be to your inbox.
