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Would separate SIM cards not work? The idea I had was to have an occasionally-on smartphone for regular things and an always-on flip phone for critical things. Sort of the same use case as a house phone.
I currently have an Android phone. It has a toggle for Wi-Fi and one for 4G connectivity, but I'm not aware of one specifically for "Internet" that still allows calls through. Not sure how that would differ substantially from just closing and reopening the Web browser. I guess it could be an easier way to toggle email notifications, but I can't see it meaningfully reducing the "onlineness" that I'm trying to get away from. Am I misunderstanding something?
Unless there's some way of cloning it your phone number is effectively locked to a single SIM card, so if you want either handset to receive phone calls to your number it needs to have that SIM inserted.
Hmm, just looked it up and apparently there are ways of cloning a SIM. You could look into that, I stopped at the search results page. SIM cloning is usually done for illicit purposes though so I'd expect it to present additional unexpected difficulties even beyond the incompatability you found trying to use a T-Mobile SIM in your Nokia. It almost certainly won't be supported* by the networks and their vendors though so unlike the T-Mobile/Nokia you can't just take it into a shop and ask them if you can try before you buy.
Wifi and 4G are the phone's means of connecting to the internet. Turn them off and you'll still have cell tower service for plain phone calls and SMS texts. You'd have no email, no browser, no doomscroll apps, no internet dependent notifications, but your "offline" apps will still work (things like the camera, timers, alarms, step counters... maybe maps? GPS will still work but it depends if you have the map saved locally for offline use).
I don't know what your skill set is like, and I've never done this, but I think an IfThisThenThat app should be able to do what you want with some simple rules that add up to "If it's between 5PM and 5AM then switch off wifi and 4G", or "if GPS is not [at the office] then switch off wifi and 4G".
*By "not supported" I imagine it could likely raise a flag of suspicious activity if two devices show up using the same SIM card simultaneously. One at a time would okay, but then that defeats most of the purpose of not having to swap the SIM between them.
Appreciate the research. Still seems like it'd be simpler and work better to just use two phone numbers, unless there's some reason that it wouldn't work. A flip phone seems strictly better as a pure communication/organization device than an awkwardly hacked smartphone. I realize that I should be open to the possibility that I don't really want what I think I want; but I don't see a very compelling case.
Of course, I'm comparing an actual smartphone to a hypothetical flip phone, and I could have an inaccurate idea of what's actually available. But that's why I asked for advice.
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Do such IfThisThenThat apps exist? I was under the understanding that mobile phone operating systems usually prevent apps from controlling system-level functions like Wi-Fi because of the obvious security problems. So you’re stuck with whatever parental controls your phone does or doesn’t provide natively.
The other problem in my experience is that there are always exceptions: you don’t need Wi-Fi at 2am because you should be asleep… except for when you get lost after the company Christmas party is an area you don’t know. You don’t need 4g on your home phone at work… except when you need to authenticate your work email with 2-step verification. There are ways around these if you prep in advance, of course, but I’ve always had to disable the controls eventually.
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