Sharing a connection means broadcasting Wi-Fi, and most basic phones physically cannot. The operating system tells you the answer before you read a single spec sheet.

Basic phone cameras have been stuck at 0.3 to 2 megapixels for a decade. One dumb phone finally broke that in 2026, and there is a cheaper answer that works better.

The feature phones that ran Google Maps are gone. Here are the three ways people actually navigate without a smartphone in 2026, and how to tell a GPS chip from a working map.