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Wisephone II Review: The Smartest Dumbphone for Smart People

Techless calls the Wisephone II the smartest dumbphone on the market. In this review, I put that claim to the test.

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You’re in quite a pickle. You like your touchscreen, your navigation app, your built-in, take-it-everywhere camera, but your smartphone is driving you crazy. You can’t put it down. Perhaps it’s too alluring, with its unrestricted access to, well, damn hear everything.

So a dumbphone, purposefully cut off from the social media apps and internet browsers, may be your salvation. But the Punkt MP02 is all buttons, and while that’s great for people who want that, it’s not you. And the Light Phone III is fantastic, very clever, but you don’t want to wait months for your order to ship.

Let me turn your attention toward the Wisephone II. It isn’t for no reason that it got a spot of honor in our guide to the Best Dumbphones. It looks and acts like a smartphone, only, dumber—that is, no social media, no email, no games, none of the time-wasting crap that makes you hate your smartphone (so, it’s actually, in a way, smarter?).

the basic connect on the wisephone ii

More so than any other dumbphone, the Wisephone II is like a smartphone tinkered with just enough to remove the unrestricted, open-ended access to apps and internet that make smartphones addictive. It looks, feels, and behaves like a smartphone for good reason. It’s based on the Samsung A16 5G. That makes it crazy fast and familiar to use, but its biggest hangup is one unusual to smartphones and dumbphones both: It requires a $15-per-month subscription to WiseOS to get complete access to all its features. That erases some of the benefit of its fairly reasonable asking price of $399.

Wisephone II (opens in a new window)

smart things and dumb things

Fully featured maps app

Large, beautiful 6.7″ touchscreen

Dumb Things That Are Just Dumb

Requires monthly $15 subscription

No emails app, which is a plus or minus depending on your outlook

The way in which I test dumbphones is the same way in which I test smartphones: I mess around with them a whole lot. You pick up your phone, dumb or smart, an awful lot and so I like to have it on the desk next to me all day for at least several days, just........

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