I love voice phones, and so do around 20 million other Americans. While most folks in the US have moved on to smartphones, there's a stable, die-hard market for inexpensive flips that hasn't gone away. While I've been disappointed by a lot of the recent offerings out there, I saw one today that excites me: Alcatel's new Go Flip 3/Smartflip running the KaiOS operating system.

The phone will be known as the Smartflip on AT&T and Cricket, and the Go Flip 3 on other carriers. It's the same phone.

There's been a crisis in flip phones over the past few years. US carriers are reducing their 2G and 3G networks and focusing on 4G calling, which many older and less expensive phones don't support. Simple phones that support 4G calling have been hard to find.

For a while now, the flip phone banner at most US carriers has been carried by the Alcatel Go Flip line—the QuickFlip/Flip 2 on AT&T, the Go Flip on T-Mobile, the MyFlip on Tracfone, and the Go Flip V on Verizon. But none have been very good. The main problem with the existing Go Flip is that its KaiOS operating system runs too heavily on its Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor and without enough features. It's sluggish and unstable, and battery life is poor.

The Go Flip 3 looks just like the previous Go Flips, but it runs a whole new KaiOS, and this one comes much closer to realizing the dreams I had when I saw the first KaiOS devices. KaiOS 2.5 has Google Assistant built in—not always on, but at the touch of a button—for voice dialing and internet queries. There's a real browser, Google Maps, YouTube, and a KaiOS store with a smattering of games, health apps, and social media.

The phone supports WhatsApp, and Alcatel told me Twitter and Facebook are coming. You don't have to load these apps, and they're going to be awkward to use—you either have to dictate your text via Google Assistant or use T9 on the keypad. But that might be the just-right sweet spot between the all-consuming smartphone and flip phones that don't stay quite connected enough.

Calling-wise, the Go Flip 3 has HD calling over LTE and Wi-Fi, as well as 3G and 2G fallback. It doesn't support EVS, the absolute best voice quality system, but that's only on high-end smartphones.

The phone supports LTE on bands 2/4/5/12/14/25/16/41+HPUE/66/71, along with 2G and 3G GSM and CDMA. This gives it maximum possible coverage on networks from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, and it means it will make calls on a merged Sprint/T-Mobile network if the two carriers do finally get together.

The Go Flip 3 upgrades the device's Bluetooth from 3.0 to 4.2. That's a big deal; I found the Go Flip's older Bluetooth 3.0 to have poor sound quality. There is also a standard 3.5mm headset jack.

Otherwise, the specs here are as basic as the previous Go Flip: a Snapdragon 210 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot, a 2.8-inch, 320-by-240 main screen, and a 2MP camera that is sure to not be very good. On T-Mobile and Metro, but not AT&T, it will have a hotspot mode, but the hotspot probably won't be very fast.

Alcatel also told me this phone will have—get this—50 percent better standby battery life than the previous model, which had 12 days of quoted standby time, but which many buyers said had more like three days after the fact. That's without increasing the device size. The 1,350mAh battery is still removable, too.

I recently looked at the Light Phone II, a $350 "artisanal" voice phone from a small Brooklyn-based company. It's neat. But at that price, it's definitely not mass market. It's a "disconnecting" device for the tech-addicted executive. Inexpensive flips like the Go Flip 3 appeal to families and elders who don't want to give their kids Instagram or who can't afford data plans.

On that theme, I asked Alcatel about parental controls and the ability to track the Go Flip 3—whether you could lock out the browser and store, for instance, and find a lost phone through Google. They didn't have an immediate answer for me, so that's something I'll clearly be checking out when I review it.

The phone will be available at AT&T and Cricket on Sept. 27, on Metro by T-Mobile later this month, and on T-Mobile in October. It'll almost certainly show up at Sprint down the road, too.

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