I often ditch my phone and carry my hotspot device for my internet. The only drawback is that for viewing my texts and OTPs i end up putting the sim in my phone or opening up the web interface on my laptop. This seems to work very well as a dumbphone per se.
How do you check sms/OTP/text using web interface on your laptop?
This probably depends on your particular dongle model. Back in 3G era, some carriers offered USB modems with SMS locked out in the firmware, but you could flash a firmware from a different operator (also install their variant of software, the only difference being the added SMS tab and a different skin) and then you can text and even use USSD! (No calls, though.)
yeah my vendor's dongle has this specific feature. A light also turns ON on the modem when SMS is received.
https://messages.google.com/web/ is one way I'm aware of, I'm sure there's others depending on the messages app used.
It seems those modems run Android 4.x with the stock messaging app: https://github.com/u0d7i/uz801#screenshots
But I guess you can install a custom messaging app that would sync the messages? (If there’s one that still supports such an old version of Android)
If you move to an Apple set up, the phone can act as a hotspot and there is no need to take out your sim. Also... you have a physical sim card? I thought those became obsolete.
Physical sims are as obsolete as 3.5mm headphones. They both continue to work and have different tradeoffs than 'modern' alternatives and you have a different selection of devices to work with.
Thanks for coming up with a very apt analogy. I wanted to reply but couldn't come up with something I felt good about.