> you can leave behind your smartphone more often... or for good

If I were spending $US300 on a phone, it ought to be my daily driver.

So I would assume this is for people who, if they do want to access social media on iOS/Android then they do it from the comfort of a large screen device such as a wifi-only iPad, tethering to their 4G dumbphone.

Oh and there's nothing preventing an e-ink device from using a cloud addressbook.

Hotspot on that tiny battery...ew

>- e-ink displays are incredibly fragile.

I think the display on my kindle is about as solid as a cellphone display...I carry mine around in a cargo pocket and it regularly gets slammed into furniture.

I mean, i do break them, but I break cellphones, too, and I treat my kindles rather harder than I treat my cellphone.

The phone number thing isn't an issue. On/off Call Forwarding is easy to set up on the first Light Phone. I can toggle it with a voice command to Google Assistant on my Pixel.

Messaging could make phone numbers a big deal

> - e-ink displays are incredibly fragile.

hmm, i have the opposite impression. compared to lcd, eink displays seem pretty robust.

I managed to crush one once. It was in a laptop pouch in a backpack with a couple of robust plastic binders and books in the main compartment, and I must have thrown it once too often into the corner/side of the corridor, having other things to do. I assume I cracked something inside, maybe even the PCB or so, as it looks dead. I might check if the screen is still alive, as it might be an issue with the logic board instead of the screen, as I now remember it (it's been a couple years, it was an iirc. 3rd gen low-end device).

Nah, The GSM standard allows for a one-to-many relationship between MDNs & IMSIs. It's just a row in a database at a telco. Several providers already offer the ability to attach multiple lines to a single dialed number.

My dad's old car radio/phone made use of that. It took an ID-1 SIM card. You know, like a non-embossed credit card, without the fancy printing. It got eventually replaced by a different radio which could use data stored on a CD fed to it's CD player to provide navigation, but I don't remember if that one even had GPS included. I guess it did, but the UX was lacking, mostly due to the small, rather dim TN panel on the cover over the CD slot.

The handover (between cells) had some issues when driving, so sometimes calls dropped when you crossed cell boundaries. In retrsospect it seemed like a race condition in the logic that notes where to route an ongoing conversation to in the event of a cell switch, combined with both phones fighting over which cell this number is in.

The nice thing about the old phone/radio was the classic green backlit monochrome dotmatrix text display.

T-Mobile allows you to have multiple devices with the same number.