They're mostly charged / topped up overnight from my 12W / 8000 mAh solar battery bank. I just throw it outside or in a window during the day and plug a USB hub into it to charge my devices overnight. My phone will usually go 2-3 days on a charge, but I've also got a 6W panel I stick in the window if it needs a little battery boost during the day. I also top off other things from the 6W panel, but those aren't exclusively solar like my EDC stuff.

Thought I was going to have to cheat a week or so ago. It was rainy and cloudy for nearly 2 weeks, and the solar battery bank was struggling to stay above 50%, but the clouds finally broke and my solar bank was able to fully recharge with a few hours of sunlight to spare.

Like I said, it's not much, but these have only ever been charged from solar**, and I think that's pretty cool.

** Except the bit of charge my phone and e-reader got from my laptop when I had it plugged into USB to flash firmware and add files.

My solar battery bank. (Not the best design with an integrated, non-removable battery, but has worked well enough)

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Here's some things I found in my research before I bought that one. Maybe you'll find them helpful since you're looking at it from the same angle I was.

Modern dumb phones have come a ways since the mid 00's. The few dumb phones I was looking at also support hotspot. That was the big thing that pushed me to try this since I frequently rely on my phone being a hotspot for work, and I assumed dumb phones couldn't do that. Seems like that's a fairly common feature on them these days.

A lot of them run KaiOS (which is kind-of FirefoxOS in the same way that Android is a Linux distro). They have decent web browsers (Firefox, obv) as well as apps, including TOTP. The only reason I "need" the bank app versus the online banking through the web browser is occasionally needing to do a few things that only the app can do (scan to deposit checks, etc). I was willing to go without the bank app, though.

I was originally looking at the Nokia 2780. The only reason I went with this one instead of a true dumb/feature phone is that I knew I could use this one as a SIP handset, if nothing else, after my 30 day challenge was up. It was also about $15 cheaper than the Nokia, so that pretty much sealed it. I could probably get by with a regular dumb phone, but this one is kind of the perfect middle ground for me.