Yet another 5G flip phone hits the market. But it is KaiOS 4.0.
From the comments:
If only this would be android…
TCL has launched a new flip phone, its first with 5G. The TCL FLIP 4 5G is now available from Metro by T-Mobile. 5G in basic/flip phones is a new trend for 2025. Sonim recently launched the XP3plus 5G on T-Mobile, which also adds 5G (among other...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/comments/1ktbndi/tcl_flip_4_w5gne/
Available to purchase over here: https://www.metrobyt-mobile.com/cell-phone/tcl-flip-4-5g
3 Likes
ys770
May 23, 2025, 3:18pm
2
Oy what a shame it’s not android. It says that it’s Android based, what does that mean?
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KaiOS is still built on top of Android, which is why certain elements—like the recovery mode—look very similar. However, I’m not familiar enough with KaiOS to say exactly how deeply it’s integrated with Android.
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I hope they will learn the lesson in time for the TCL Flip 5
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anybody know what chip this phone has?
It is a fork of Android that shares very little with it anymore.
3 Likes
sb123
May 23, 2025, 6:34pm
8
Snapdragon gen-4 is a low grade processor for smartphone, for a flip phone i would assume it would do decently (regarding the procceser only not the os)
1 Like
its also qualcomm which would be very annoying to modify
kosherboy:
KaiOS 4.0
This is the greatest post in the history of posts ever written on KaiOS:@Flippy
The point of a flip phone is to be good at making calls and sending texts. Period. Hard stop. Anything else is a BONUS. Take a quick look at ANY KaiOS phones out there. They are atrocious!! The contact list is BASICALLY UNUSABLE! On those phones (Preloaded without enough bloatware to rival some windows PC’s btw) trying to get through a list of more than 30 contacts is a chore (and most of us have at minimum 300). As you scroll down, the phone can barely catch up. Scroll too fast and the phone will just skip you to the top of the list. Trying to compose a message is basically impossible- from defaulting from T9 to ABC every stinkin time you compose a message, to not being able to handle MMS at all, the texting on Kai OS is broken. Oh, and the phones lifespans are basically 2 months. And not because of the hardware, which isn’t bad at all, just because they’ll eventually stop booting up at all. Oh yes, but it runs WhatsApp!! Thats the selling point. The only selling point. Terrible Chaos phone. But it can natively run a few apps that most people using this phone could not care for.
On the other end is some great android-based phones that can do all phone stuff just fine, but struggle to run apps, which they were not intended to do. Great. But for the target demographic that’s perfect. I know an older person that bought the TCL flip from Verizon (different model) It runs KaiOS. The man does not store contacts or send texts. After a few months of simply making calls, the phone would not allow any more phone calls because “memory full”. I deleted every possible thing from the phone (recent calls) to no avail. The only thing that fixed it was a full reset. This is an older person that simply wants a phone to dial numbers. And I had to reset for him EVERY 2 months!! KaiOS is broken .
In regards to the Blackberry comments, everyone who uses a basic phone would love to have blackberries back! Reliable useable devices with a QWERTY keyboard? Sign me up! In fact, all of the older flip phones were more reliable than what’s sold now. But we can’t have that back. It’s a fact: due to OS limitations, the old java phones won’t be compatible with 4g VOLTE, and the only choice was to use Android (or develop a new OS from the ground up -not happening). So we got some more functions, but a much less stable operating system. The reason for the Wi-Fi/4g/CPU is very simple,.
Wi-Fi is baked into the software anyway, and most of the chips, so why would they work extra to remove it?
4g is required to having a phone connect to networks in USA in this day and age
And surprisingly with all their fancy quad-core stuff, the phone is still playing catch up when buttons are pressed quickly.
Sorry that you had this rough introduction to the flip phone world, but unfortunately all that’s happened in the past 10 years is 2 (or should I say 20?) steps back, 1 step forward. By the way I am in no way saying that I think the TCL is a good phone, but at a $20 price point, its hard to beat for basic functionality! (Personally, I am a fan of the Kyocera Cadence)
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So what could be the reason that they keep using it. You think they didn’t like the fact that the Flip 2 was modified so much?
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ys770
May 23, 2025, 8:05pm
12
It’s probably cheaper
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ys770
May 28, 2025, 11:32pm
14
Just got the phone today. The debug code works and I have adb access. I thought that was disabled in Kaios 3, cool that it works on Kaios 4. Other than that so far its just regular Kaios garbage
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What does debugging do on KaiOs? You can uninstall apps like on Android?
ys770
May 28, 2025, 11:41pm
16
na, pm doesn’t work. It tells me this: cmd: Can't find service: package
