Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

tuxphones.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 212 posts

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#121

Post by oneowl »

janjongboom wrote: post #82
robertAngst wrote: post #9

How difficult would this be to add GIPO to? This crushes the Raspi3 for the value.

We did exactly that four years ago with JanOS ( http://janos.io/ ), it turned (Firefox OS) mobile phone motherboards into IoT devices. You could also control some GPIO, see http://blog.telenor.io/gonzo/hardware/2015/02/10/gpio.html for an example of remapping the volume buttons to control a new LED. Unfortunately we couldn't find a single OEM that wanted to sell the motherboards if they weren't going in a mobile phon…

Just looked at the website. Very cool project. Are you still mainatining jan os?

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#122

Post by avip »

ioddly wrote: post #105
andrey_utkin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. This already is happening. I got bored of waiting for "Linux smartphone" and accidentally found that it's actually quite easy and affordable to build a wearable computer from scratch. And I built myself one of course. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/c... I just used new generation of the same display, and a one handed Twiddler 3 keyboard. Raspberry pi doesn't have cellular, so…

What's battery life like? I'm building a (non-wearable) Pi with touchscreen but haven't been able to get a good estimate.

The pi cannot be a good option if battery life is a concern.

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#124

Post by auslander »

newhotelowner wrote: post #63
tluyben2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no kids myself, but from friends who do have kids I hear they get teased (and sometimes bullied) if they don't have a half decent smartphone. And some of these friends are living in poorer ('non western') countries even. I guess my friends are not lying, but not sure how widespread that is.

> from friends who do have kids I hear they get teased (and sometimes bullied) if they don't have a half decent smartphone My daughter is in middle school, and pretty much everyone in her class has iPhone. Only a few have an Android phone. School requires every student to have a Chromebook, but even teachers encourage students to use smartphones. Also, one of the apps only works on smartphones. My daughter has my old…

> School requires every student to have a Chromebook

And a mandatory Google account for tracking your kids. I'd change the school.

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#126

Post by on_and_off »

type-2 wrote: post #71
jeswin wrote: post #14

Having spent a couple of years building apps for KaiOS (which is really Firefox OS), I can say that it's probably the easiest development platform out there - mostly pure web; with some proprietary extensions. I wish Firefox OS hadn't thrown in the towel so early. These devices are selling millions of units every month.

firefox os had so much potential, now with pwa's being the next big thing, it seem like firefox os could be a game changer. Too bad they killed it.

I don't know about its potential but what was there was not a serious challenger to the existing platforms.

I was working for a very large app (tens of millions of daily users) at the time when firefox was trying to convince companies to port their apps to it.

We were big enough that Firefox sent their advocates to our offices and tried to convince us to port our app. Since what we were offering was a service, we were naturally open to have it on as many platforms as possible. I think that there might have been a monetary incentive as well but I might be misremembering there (I was not part of that negotiation).

After a week with their sdk and help from their devs, we threw the towel.

Publishing our product on Fos would have been impossible while keeping the app quality on par with iOS and Android and there were lots of missing/buggy APIs.

That was our last discussion with Firefox. For as long as there have been phones, there have been web apps targeting them, but there is a reason why we are still building native apps.

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#127

Post by mrweasel »

I don't understand why the Google Assistant has to be thrown in. Beside me not liking the idea of Google Assistant processing my request, I don't really believe that it's a feature that many need or even request.

Of cause I'm in a non-English speaking country, so that may change the usage, but I don't know anyone who uses Google Assistant, Siri or Cortana and only two people who use Alexa, which technically isn't even available here.

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#128

Post by andrey_utkin »

ioddly wrote: post #105
andrey_utkin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. This already is happening. I got bored of waiting for "Linux smartphone" and accidentally found that it's actually quite easy and affordable to build a wearable computer from scratch. And I built myself one of course. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/c... I just used new generation of the same display, and a one handed Twiddler 3 keyboard. Raspberry pi doesn't have cellular, so…

What's battery life like? I'm building a (non-wearable) Pi with touchscreen but haven't been able to get a good estimate.

Battery lasted for almost 4 days when I left just RPi Zero W, idling, connected to Wifi, without X11 running.

Battery I am using is this: https://tech.scargill.net/ravpower-the-ultimate-pi-ups/

It indeed helpfully maintains stable power output when being plugged and unplugged from mains itself. But only on one of the output ports. Also this is not always true when there's active power consumer on the second port. Other than that, I'm happy I found this powerbank model.

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#129

Post by andrey_utkin »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #119
andrey_utkin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. This already is happening. I got bored of waiting for "Linux smartphone" and accidentally found that it's actually quite easy and affordable to build a wearable computer from scratch. And I built myself one of course. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/c... I just used new generation of the same display, and a one handed Twiddler 3 keyboard. Raspberry pi doesn't have cellular, so…

Non-amp url: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/7/27/16035508/d...

Yeah, terribly sorry, I just pasted it without looking, was on the phone.

Re: Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia

#130

Post by barbecue_sauce »

type-2 wrote: post #71
jeswin wrote: post #14

Having spent a couple of years building apps for KaiOS (which is really Firefox OS), I can say that it's probably the easiest development platform out there - mostly pure web; with some proprietary extensions. I wish Firefox OS hadn't thrown in the towel so early. These devices are selling millions of units every month.

firefox os had so much potential, now with pwa's being the next big thing, it seem like firefox os could be a game changer. Too bad they killed it.

Are PWAs the next big thing? I thought the hype for PWAs had for the most part fizzled due to lack of user interest.
Post reply on HN