Sonim phones? (comms and nav content)

[zuren]

My nearly 4 year old Galaxy S3 is becoming buggy and unreliable so I'm starting to think about my near-future phone solution. For more than a year I've been threatening to go back to a dumbphone; cheaper, less to go wrong, less to maintain/manage better battery life, many times better antenna, much fewer distractions. What has kept me hooked to a smartphone is the navigation and the ability to tether to laptop....but I find that I waste a lot of time on a smartphone. Now that may have changed and I was wondering if anyone has experience with Sonim phones?

http://www.sonimtech.com/index.php/products/device/device/SonimXP5_15

What is attractive about the XP5 is that it is a mostly-dumbphone with 4G LTE and the ability to tether (most dumbphones do 2G or 3G and forget about tethering). From what I've read, you can tether to PC or tablet. If anyone has any experience with Sonim phones, I would love to hear about it! My idea is to switch to AT&T with this phone and add a 4G LTE tablet to the mix (eg, LG G Pad V410) so I can swap the SIM card back and forth. I need to research this more, but I believe that would work.

Thanks!

 

[BrianV]

I would confirm tethering would work on ATT. Those evil jerks do all sorts of nasty crap if you don't buy the phone from them.
Like Wifi Calling or tethering not working. Given that the Sonmin phones are custom and not Android or iOS, maybe ATT can't block much.