Flip Assistant features

Ask anything, out loud

Press once to start talking, once to stop. What you said is transcribed, answered, and on screen a few seconds later. If a word comes back wrong, you can fix it with the keypad before sending rather than starting over.

Typing is still there. The question screen has a keypad field, and you can dictate into it and edit afterwards, which is usually faster than doing either alone.

Answers are sized for the screen

A fact comes back as a fragment. Something that genuinely needs steps gets numbered ones, up to a limit. There is no markdown, no preamble and no offer to help further, because asterisks render as asterisks on this screen and pleasantries cost a line.

Numbers dial, addresses navigate

Any phone number in an answer is picked out and highlighted where it sits. Move to it with the D-pad and press OK to dial. Any street address gets a row underneath that turns it into directions, so looking up a business and driving there is one continuous action.

Uses the internet, and counts toward your monthly allowance.

Two-factor codes

The reason many people carry a smartphone they do not want is that their bank, their email or their insurance wants a six digit code. This does that job on the flip phone.

Moving your accounts across

Google Authenticator can export everything it holds as a single QR code. Scan it once and your accounts are on the phone. There is no typing of secrets on a keypad, which is the part that usually stops people.

How it stays private

Codes are calculated on the phone from a stored secret and the clock. Nothing is sent anywhere, which is why they work in a basement and on a plane. The secrets are encrypted under a key that cannot be extracted from the handset, and locked behind a PIN that is never stored, so nobody can decrypt them without someone typing it.

Runs entirely on the phone. Free, and it keeps working even if you stop subscribing.

QR codes

Menus, parking meters, forms at the feed store. QR codes turned up everywhere in a few years and a flip phone camera is not usually asked to read them.

Point at a code and it tells you what it says. A phone number becomes something you can dial. A setup code configures the app. A web address can be summarized rather than opened, which matters when there is no real browser to open it in.

Decoding happens on the phone. Camera frames are never uploaded.

Scanning is free. Summarizing a link uses the internet and counts toward your allowance.

Weather

Enter a zip code and you get current conditions, a twelve hour temperature curve, and expected rainfall in inches rather than a percentage you have to interpret. Three day highs and lows sit underneath.

Inches, not percentages

A sixty percent chance of rain tells you very little. Four tenths of an inch tells you whether to move hay. The National Weather Service publishes both; most apps show you the one that is easier to render.

Severe weather leads

An active warning for your county appears above the forecast in inverted text, not buried beneath it.

Comes from the National Weather Service, which is free to use. Never counted, it works before you have set up an account at all, and it keeps working if you stop subscribing.

Maps and directions

Say where you are starting and where you are going, or type either. You get turn by turn directions in plain text: the road, the direction, the distance, one step per line.

Finding places, not just addresses

Street addresses work, and so do business names. If the mapping service cannot place something, the request falls back to searching for it and routing to what it finds, so "the hardware store in Liberty" usually works as well as a street number.

Saved routes work with no signal

A route can be saved to the phone and reopened from the main menu. Once saved it needs no connection, which is the difference between useful and useless on a road with no bars.

Distance and time up front

The header carries the total distance and drive time, so you know what you are committing to before reading a single step.

Uses the internet to build a route, and counts toward your allowance. Reading a saved one does not.

Texted links

Somebody sends you a link. On a flip phone that is normally a dead end: you cannot open it, and typing the address into anything is out of the question.

This finds the links in your recent messages and lists them with who sent each one. Choose one and you get a few sentences on what is there. No typing at any point.

Reading your messages happens on the phone, and only the link you choose is ever sent anywhere. This is the one thing an assistant you text cannot do, because it never sees the message the link arrived in.

Finding links is free. Summarizing one counts toward your allowance.

Notes

The notepad these phones ship with is keypad only, which means in practice nobody uses it. Speak a note instead and it is written down for you.

A note can be edited with the keypad afterwards, and you can add to an existing one by speaking again rather than retyping what is already there. Everything stays on the phone.

Reading and editing is free. Dictating uses the internet to transcribe, and counts toward your allowance.

Every screen is a list you move through with up and down. Number keys jump straight to a row. The soft keys under the screen are labeled with what they actually do on that screen, using the phone's own system, so the app behaves like the rest of the handset rather than like a website in a wrapper.

Four text sizes and five color schemes, including a light one that stays readable in direct sun, where these screens usually turn into a mirror. Nothing runs in the background: no services, no polling, no wake locks. Closed, the app uses no battery at all.

See pricing or check whether your phone is supported.