Once upon a time, mobile phones could only handle calls and texts, with the occasional game of Snake thrown in. Nowadays, the best smartphones are powerful computers that have become a singular device that can do everything, which means it’s hard to tear yourself away from them. Remember reading? Touching grass? No, us neither.

That’s why the old style of mobile phone is making a comeback. Known as dumbphones, these basic and simple handsets hark back to the early 2000s with compact designs and only the most essential functions of a phone, which turns out to be a phone.

Smartphones and the so-called “doomscrolling” they encourage thanks to addictive social media apps means many of us spend hours a day mindlessly scrolling. It’s true that smartphones are also useful tools with modern conveniences of a digital camera, taxi hailing apps, online banking and free calls to anyone in the world just a tap away. But some people, including perhaps you if you are reading this, could be considering switching to a simpler device to reclaim some of your free time back.

Taking a break from your iPhone or Android phone is sometimes known as a “digital detox”, which can help reset your relationship with technology so that you use your smartphone when you return to it, rather than it using you. You might like the dumbphone life so much tat you never go back, though it’s quite hard to live in the modern world without one sometimes.

If you have the willpower to only use a smartphone as a tool, more power to you. For the rest of us, there is a dumbphone out there for you.

I’ve been testing and reviewing dumbphones for the last six years, so I have plenty of experience to help you decide how to best spend your money. All basic phones can make and receive calls and text messages, but others have rudimentary web browsers or access to simplified versions of apps such as Google Maps and YouTube.

Some also allow you to ‘hotspot’ which is when you can use the dumbphone to connect another device to the internet such as a tablet or laptop. It means you can carry a dumbphone and another device if you really need to access the web, but your phone is not that device, creating a barrier between you and the online world. It’s very easy to lose hours to a smartphone because they are always there with an internet connection.

All dumbphones can handle calls and texts, but no dumbphones can run WhatsApp. One dumbphone operating system called KaiOS used to support it, but Meta ended that support in January 2025. One of the phones on this list claims to be able to send messages over Signal, but I’ve found the service incredibly unreliable. You cannot use internet and app-based messaging services on these phones.

The upsides are days-long battery life and, if you can stick at it, a mobile phone that you use, rather than a smartphone that ends up using you.

A few dumbphones have rudimentary web browsers but they are so basic they are only useful to, say, look up an address of a business or pub. You can’t use them for much else at all due to the low-powered hardware and tiny screens of these phones.

One of the phones on this list can access Google services and has a Google Maps app, but this is rare. Dumbphones really are mostly quite restrictive, and this is their purpose. They’re not meant to be smartphones that look like old phones – they are meant to be just like the mobile phones of the early 2000s.

Many dumbphones have 4G connections, and I recommend you find one with one. The very cheapest basic phones on sale only use 2G, which is less reliable, has worse call quality, and eventually won’t exist in the UK. Also, if you travel, many countries have already shut down their 2G networks, so these phones won’t work when roaming in those countries.

Here are the seven best dumbphones you can currently buy in the UK, all tried and tested by me in 2025.

(P.S., I have not noted that any of the listed dumbphones’ cameras are bad. You can assume they are all bad. Because they are.)

This is the best dumbphone for most people despite not being the cheapest, thanks to a good design, clear screen, fast performance and pleasingly simple functionality. Modelled on the original 3210 from 1999, the phone is small for the modern era and comes in black, yellow or bright blue (the latter my favourite). It’s made by Finnish company HMD, which currently owns the rights to the Nokia brand for phones.

The phone charges via USB-C and the removable battery (remember those?) can last about four days in my experience, with a couple of longish calls a day and a few texts. As with all the phones in this list, text messages mercifully display as continuous threads as they do on smartphones. Texting on a numberpad is just as fiddly as you remember, though, but there’s a predictive text option. It’s annoying that the phone buzzes when you get a text, then buzzes again when you unlock the phone to read said text.

There’s no Wi-Fi, and the browser is incredibly basic and won’t load a lot fo complex webpages, great for not looking at the internet. A colour screen is nice to have and the black background with white text is easy on the eyes in the dark, a nice touch. The £74.99 price is a little steep but the quality is noticeable.

This flip phone is the only one tested that runs KaiOS, an operating system that supports Google account login. That means you can use Google Maps (but not turn-by-turn directions), access your email account and sync your contacts and calendar appointments. But I personally only used Maps on this utilitarian flipper, because having emails on your dumbphone goes someway to defeating the point of cutting back on smartphone use.

The Flip 3 is much larger than the Motorola Razr you remember from the 2000s, with a chunky design and big, easy to press buttons. The inner screen is colour while a useful outer screen displays the time, signal, battery life and notifications including incoming calls and texts.

Call quality is truly excellent thanks to 4G voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) tech that makes voices crystal clear. Texting, and the OS in general, is more sluggish than on the Nokia 3210, which is a little annoying but did encourage me to use it less, which in the end was appreciated. It charges via USB-C and I found the battery would last about three days with light use, but a one hour phone call will drain the juice by about 10 percent.

HMD, the maker of Nokia phones, released the Nokia 2660 Flip in 2022 but it has since been replaced by the HMD 2660 Flip. It is exactly the same phone with slightly better build quality and a shiny mirror finish when closed. The software is otherwise identical. I don’t like the mirror finish because it gets greased up in seconds, but I do like that it charges via USB-C instead of the Nokia version’s ageing micro-USB port.

Based on another classic old Nokia from back in the day, the phone is a solid option if you want a simple flipper that can manage calls and texts – this handset can barely do anything else.

It doesn’t have Wi-Fi or a browser, so it’s impossible to scroll away on websites, but also means you definitely can’t Google anything or download apps. One annoyance is the volume buttons are easily knocked and so I found the ringer volume would turn right up to the maximum accidentally in my pocket rather than staying on silent. Aside from that the battery lasts for days and it’s very reliable.

If you remember being astonished by just how tiny the original Nokia 8210 was back in 1999, I’m afraid this remake isn’t as small, but it is a solid basic phone option. It charges via the older micro-USB but at least comes with a charger in the box, and runs a very similar operating system to the Nokia 3210 at the top of this list.

This 8210 has a slightly larger screen and slightly smaller buttons, making it a weirdly proportioned option that’s good if you want to make the text of the display larger. It works on 4G and the battery lasts for ages.

Just like the 3210 and 2660 options, there’s no Wi-Fi or app store and the browser is practically unusable, so it’s a good one to keep it simple with.

The Light Phone 2 is a premium-priced basic phone that is at once very simple but also has several functions you won’t find on other dumbphones. It has a monochrome E-Ink touchscreen, much like a Kindle e-reader, which is a little sluggish to respond to touches and swipes. If you buy one, make sure you pick correctly between the North American or International versions.

This tiny gadget is a 4G phone that can call and text but also has optional apps that you can add or remove from it via an online dashboard, accessible via a computer. These include a hotspot so you can connect other devices to its 4G connection, podcast player, with your podcasts feeds addable from the dashboard, a music player for you to load MP3s on the phone (there’s Bluetooth and a headphone jack), as well as a directions tool that is quite clunky but does work either with a map or text directions.

My biggest disappointment with the Light Phone 2 is the battery life, which fluctuates wildly and is overall poor. When using it as my main phone, I could barely get to the end of the day on a charge before reaching for the micro-USB cable. When a device this basic can’t achieve multiday battery life, it’s a problem. The $299 asking price is also high, but this is a much nicer item to own and hold than any of the cheaper phones on this list.

Doro specialises in making mobile phones for senior buyers, and the 6880 is the best of them. It has modern 4G connectivity and comes bundled with a charging cradle, which not only makes it easy to pop in and charge, but means you can treat the phone like a home phone and leave it in one place in your house.

A flip phone, it has a nice rubberised and plastic construction along with HD voice call quality, hearing aid compatibility and a programmable assistance button on the device that can be pressed to send an alert to your trusted contacts if you’re in need of help.

The external screen shows the time, signal and who is calling and there’s a torch and camera built in, even if the latter is pretty bad quality. Again, there are no apps, Wi-Fi or hotspot, but for sheer simplicity and thoughtful design, the Doro is worth a look for yourself or to gift to a friend or relative who doesn’t want a smartphone.

Much like the Light Phone, the Punkt MP02 is an aspirational, premium device from a small startup. It looks like a retro calculator and is very well made, with 4G, calls and texts, hotspot function and charging via USB-C. It’s a lovely object to hold, and very aesthetically pleasing. The battery lasts two or three days with light use.

But that will only get you so far. Punkt claims the phone can access Signal, the privacy-minded messaging service, but the app (called Pigeon) frequently breaks and I could not rely on it. The firm also released a second-generation of the MP02 in recent months, and people who didn’t update the software before a certain date are stuck on an old version forever.

It’s these reliability issues and odd choices that annoy customers that stop me from wholeheartedly recommending this phone. But if you want your dumbphone to be a beautiful object and only really want calls and texts, the MP02 does the job. Plus the light blue one looks incredible.

This is the cheapest phone on this list and while it does make calls and send texts, I would not recommend buying it. Any of the Nokia phones here do a much better job. For a start, this £29.99 phone feels incredibly cheap to hold with a flip mechanism that doesn’t open or shut satisfyingly. It feels like it’s about to snap in half at any moment.

Calls sound OK but this is also a 2G-only phone, whereas every other phone listed here is 4G. The problem with 2G phones is that while they work currently, the UK’s phone operators are going to shut down their 2G networks in the early 2030s. While it looks like that means this phone will work OK till then, in reality 2G networks are less reliable and you’ll be stuck with much worse call quality than on a 4G phone.

To add insult to injury, texting on this phone is also a horrid experience. It doesn’t even offer predictive text, something mobile phones with keypads had in 1999. I’ve included this phone at the bottom of the list to demonstrate it’s not one to go for!