For the last year I've been using old HTC phones from 2010. The HTC Wildfire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wildfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wildf

For the last year I've been using old HTC phones from 2010. The HTC Wildfire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wildfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wildfire), then more recently the HTC Desire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire). If you accept that they won't do everything a modern smartphone can do, and limit how you use them to what they are good at, an old phone can be great. They take a bit of work to set up right. You need to find and download old APKs for the applications you want to use. All the one-click rooting tools have vanished from the internet (but I've been able to get root in adb using psneuter). Google Maps works great. Moon Reader is awesome for ebooks. SMS is good enough for messaging people (you need to tell your friends that you can't read emoji's). Google Authenticator looks even better. Applications of that era often had an offline mode so it doesn't matter much if their APIs are no longer compatible. MessagEase make an amazing keyboard and the latest version still supports Froyo. You can do CalDAV and CardDav with a little help. The default browser won't load a lot of modern sites because either it can't render the JS or it doesn't support the cypher that it's encrypted with. I keep JS disabled, and I don't care if I can't visit some websites. I found that the Wildfire's screen's white turned blue after they were heavily dropped. I broke three or four that way but it didn't matter much because I could always get replacements for around AU$20. The Desire seems to have a more sturdy screen but they have more circuit boards inside and I've had a harder time finding reliable phones. I buy them for about AU$30 so, still it's affordable to take a chance and buy them up until you can make a complete phone. If you're thinking about going back to a dumb phone, I think that an old smartphone running Froyo has most of the advantages of the dumb phone with none of the disadvantages of a smartphone (Gingerbread is probably good too but I haven't used it since it was current).