Touchscreen Water Resistant Android Flip Phone

The Cat S22 Flip is a 2.8" touchscreen, Android 11, 4G LTE GSM phone which is, water resistant. Originally sold for the US T-Mobile network, these phones have been unlocked and work fine on the Australian Telstra network (including Aldi Mobile). At around AU$100 through Amazon, this is a bargain, provided you can put up with the quirks of the phone. 

The phone has a big rubber phone keypad, and a minuscule touch screen. To enter text you either use the physical keyboard, or a virtual touch screen keyboard. The problem is that by default the Kika 12-Key Keyboard app, using T9 predictive text is turned on. When I tried to type on the virtual QWERTY keyboard, the predictive text system came up with weird choices, making text entry extremely difficult. Manually selecting Google's Gboard in settings and deselected predictive text helped, but some applications were still doing predictive text. After reading dozens of suggestions on the web as to how to fix this, involving modding the operating system, or installing yet more apps, I simply updated Gboard via the App Store, and the problem vanished.

The next quirk was that I had to set the APN Data Settings manually. 

This phone has a tiny screen compared to modern folding phones, but having broken several of those, I am prepared to see how rugged the Cat S22 is. I have suggested Unihertz make something similar, but with a bigger screen, and a physical QWERTY keyboard, and a smaller numeric keypad.

Flip Phone Screen Cracking May be Due to Stress From Hard Third Party Protective Cover

The case of my Samsung Flip Phone cracked after being dropped on a hard floor, resulting in an intermittent fault. So I purchased a third party case to protect the replacement phone. However, I noticed that when folded to 90 degrees (halfway closed) the hinge mechanism appeared to be putting pressure on the phone's hinge. 

After a few days the screen protector started to lift and bubble, along the fold in the screen. I removed the base part of the case, leaving just the two parts covering each side of the phone, this eliminated the problem. It may be that cases of this type are causing, or making worse, flip phone screen cracking. I noticed the same problem with two third party covers of the same design, from two different suppliers, on two Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 model phones.