Unfortunately, even now, if they made a device that was purported to be "dumb" and no-frills, I probably wouldn't believe that the phone were as pared-down as I might wish to believe, simply because I'd be sure that the chipsets available to manufacturers might actually possess far greater power under the hood, than some simple throwback of a handset might seem to house.
You'd probably get a 32-bit ARM at a few hundred MHz, with several MB of RAM, like this:
I don't know if that counts as being minimal to you, but they're certainly not putting even low-end smartphone SoCs in these. Interesting that a low-end smartphone costs roughly the same, with all the smart features, but not as much ruggedness:
You'd probably get a 32-bit ARM at a few hundred MHz, with several MB of RAM, like this:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107
I don't know if that counts as being minimal to you, but they're certainly not putting even low-end smartphone SoCs in these. Interesting that a low-end smartphone costs roughly the same, with all the smart features, but not as much ruggedness:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9558854