Compared to smartphones, ‘dumb’ phones have a handful of features we remember fondly, like a battery that lasted for days and an easy-to-hold, indestructible body.
Fonebud Essential Plus is a portable power bank that recharges devices and it also pairs with your smartphone via Bluetooth to bring you the best features of a dumbphone.
The product which was on display at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair last week and CES earlier in the year, is created by Sun-U, a team of smart device manufacturers from Malaysia and Hong Kong.
Fonebud acts as a remote handset for you smartphone, meaning you can leave your phablet in your bag instead of pressing it against your face to make calls. Using the Fonebud unit as a handset also means you can still use your smartphone screen to browse the internet while on the phone.
It’s lightweight and curved design is also tough so if you drop it while taking it out of you bag you won’t need to head immediately to the Apple store for a replacement screen. The handset — with speaker and microphone — lets you pick up, hang up and redial the last number you called from your phone.
Once paired to you smartphone, Fonebud will beep at you once you are more than 10 metres away from your phone, so it will prompt you if you are stepping away from the taxi you just left your phone in.
It has a dual pairing system and a different coloured light will flash to differentiate between each of your phones, so you can chose to pick up a call from your personal phone but let your work phone go to voicemail.
It also acts as a remote to trigger your phone’s camera, a personal distress alarm and a torch.
“It took many years of planning, designing and prototype testing as well as performance and function testing to obtain the desired results as planned before Fonebud was born. We took every challenge as an opportunity to make our design better, taking into account what our user wants because we believe every problem has a solution and our user knows best,” a spokesperson for the company said.