[gaelenh]

I have the T-Mobile version of the LTE dumbphone (Alcatel Go Flip). It can be used as a hotspot, wifi calling, and HD voice (much clearer than previous dumbphones). KaiOS is really laggy unfortunately.

I haven't used that phone in 6 months or so because I switched to an Apple Watch series 3. I've never had a smartphone as my actual phone. I synced it to my SIM on my wife's phone with my Apple ID, then reset her phone back to her stuff.

The watch works great as my only phone. Eats batter power, about 15 hours per charge, less if I talk or listen to music more than a couple hours per day. Looking forward to watchOS 5 because it will the phone self-manage wifi settings, which should fix a lot of the battery issues. Right now I can only connect to one wifi network (since I don't have a phone to sync to that manages it). Once I can connect to my home and office wifi, battery life will improve.

Not having a phone in my pocket ever again is a great feeling. Just the default apps on it. Wish I could stream podcasts. I still keep the dumbphone around the house in case I need to take an SMS (Apple Watch apparently doesn't handle those either, just Apple Messages).

[rootusrootus]

You are doing [more or less] exactly what I am planning to do when the next Apple Watch is released. I just have a S1 right now so it is tethered, but in a couple months I am planning to get an LTE model and then ditch the smartphone as often as I can. I don't make too many voice calls these days so I see only upsides.

My S1 definitely does text messages, not just iMessages, but like I said, it is tethered. If the LTE model cannot do standalone texts, that is a bit unfortunate -- I do get normal text messages periodically and I would hate to give those up entirely.