61–70 of 211 posts
I'm sorry, but no, you don't need to halt execution simply because I'm an admin on my own device. Particularly if I can do exactly the same thing by just using your web interface (90% of the time this is available).
Someone should do a Linux phone that scales way back: 1. you can dial phone numbers somehow 2. you can talk on the phone 3. you can hear the person on the other line 4. the cell reception on the phone is decent quality 5. antenna is properly placed for very good reception 6. basic SMS works, all the time 7. has been extensively tested to work with a single carrier, any other carrier is no warranty 8. boot time and sh…
I use lineage on oneplus phones and have no problems. I can't do internet banking and a bunch of other non-free things, but really, who needs that? I have a web browser. The only thing that doesn't work is google meet and google docs and google drive because they intentionally break the mobile experience in the web. But there is a simple solution. Simply don't use google services. If/when my employer demands that of…
> I can't do internet banking and a bunch of other non-free things, but really, who needs that? I do, and so do a majority of smartphone users. Good for you that you are fine doing without it, but most people will not accept that trade off. I ran CyanogenMod back when that was a thing, but at that time SafetyNet didn't exist, and it was a rare event when an app that ran on Google-approved Android didn't run on CM. No…
No idea if these work on Lineage, etc...
On a similar note I've been wanting to buy and use a fully "free" phone - one where I have complete control over most if not all things. But it appears to me that unless you use a regular "phone", there is no way you can DIY your way into building a "modern" phone bit by bit like how a desktop could be made.* Calling/4g/5g require specific hardware that seems difficult to integrate at a hobbyist level (unlike say ins…
Some CPUs and SoC can be operated to their fullest capabilities with pure open hardware and software designs where you have all the control in the world (if we draw the line at silicon diffusion and packaging), but those usually lack one thing or another making them less feasible for common modern use. Often these are things like memory controllers and I/O where internal SoC peripherals need special initialisation before they are usable. Even in cases where the driver side of things is reverse-engineered a bunch of Real-Time OS code needs to be loaded at boot time to get things like GPUs, Basebands and storage to work at all. So far, there are practically no cases where those have been reverse-engineered and replaced.
For a lot of internet-commenting-people, 'open' means something specific to them, like changing some design aspects like colours and fonts, or installing cracked software. Those are mostly just end-user features and have little to do with openness. This has a sad side-effect making searching for 'open' information get littered with what essentially boils down to appearance and recompositions of existing software.
Perhaps we need 'levels' of openness or other words to describe what we mean. The Snapdragon example is a good one in that it essentially uses an openly available and targetable ISA, but closed system design which still makes it impossible to use as-is (thus needing the blobs you mentioned). On one hand it's all legal and NDA stuff, on the other hand it's also laziness and cheaping out on the long-term usability. If a company were to spend just a little of their marketing budget on finding out the parts of the hardware that doesn't need all that NDA coverage, making open software to run the hardware becomes much easier.
Someone should do a Linux phone that scales way back: 1. you can dial phone numbers somehow 2. you can talk on the phone 3. you can hear the person on the other line 4. the cell reception on the phone is decent quality 5. antenna is properly placed for very good reception 6. basic SMS works, all the time 7. has been extensively tested to work with a single carrier, any other carrier is no warranty 8. boot time and sh…
1. Yes, has a dialpad. Works as you would expect
2, 3, 4. Yes, works well on my carrier
5. The antenna is along the side of the phone I believe and the reception seems good, I haven't had issues with this
6. I would say SMS only works about 95% percent of the time. The phone does randomly disconnect from the celluar network maybe once every day or two
7. Works well on my carrier, no issues here. I have a data plan and it works fine
8. It takes maybe a minute or two to boot, but to be fair my Samsung A52 Android takes longer to boot, maybe 2 minutes
9. Yes, there is a contact app, don't know about snake :)
Other:
10. The phone is slow, firefox works and all the websites I visit (including google maps, uber, etc.) render and work correctly, but slowly. I wouldn't say too slow to browse, but 100% it is slow
11. Be CAREFUL inserting the SIM card, it is extremely easy to break the SIM pins and brick the phone if the SIM card is not inserted correctly (I learnt this the hard way)
12. Surprisingly a large amount of apps available via flatpak/flathub, including both foss apps for things like email and 3rd party clients for things like spotify and whatsapp (text only, no video or audio calls). All the core linux stuff and lots of the foss apps via apk
13. However not all apps on flathub are compatible with the PinePhone since PinePhones uses aarch64 architecture, not x86_64
14. Very poor battery life out of the box, about 4 hours tops. However, after installing tlp and irqbalance (via apk) and setting auto-suspend to 1 minute, the battery life is about 8 to 12 hours of "normal" usage, so quite usuable
15. Camera is very basic
I expected this to at least mention the pine phone, the librem, or the Ubuntu phone (which was charming). It’s just about de-googled android and how it doesn’t work very well due to how everything depends on google play services
Even that aspect is wildly overblown in my experience of using Google-free Android devices for the last 12 years. Yes, the thing will prompt you to install some Google-thing because it supposedly does not work without it - there are currently two such notifications on one of my devices telling me so. The thing is, nearly everything I throw at the device works even though some things complain about the supposed lack of Google services. I click away the warning if it appears and just use the software, this includes e.g. BankID - a Swedish electronic ID provider - and similar apps. I do not have microG installed on my main device either, I just forego on using Google services altogether.
All in all I think the current situation with de-Googled Android is quite useable. If ever some mobile thing comes along which more resembles the way software is installed on personal computers - i.e. install Linux or BSD of choice, add required software, configure accounts and you're in the game - I might move to that but until such a time I'll keep on using AOSP-derived Android distributions in combination with self-hosted services.
Someone should do a Linux phone that scales way back: 1. you can dial phone numbers somehow 2. you can talk on the phone 3. you can hear the person on the other line 4. the cell reception on the phone is decent quality 5. antenna is properly placed for very good reception 6. basic SMS works, all the time 7. has been extensively tested to work with a single carrier, any other carrier is no warranty 8. boot time and sh…
· I can program the phone to block numbers and send http requests over the net.
· Tethering, even if I need a USB cable for that.
· I can record calls. Both sides.
If I can't program it, I'd just buy a dumbphone. If I can tether, I can do without anything else, just carrying a tablet or small laptop.
For me, all this is obvious, but it doesn't seem the same for others.
Someone should do a Linux phone that scales way back: 1. you can dial phone numbers somehow 2. you can talk on the phone 3. you can hear the person on the other line 4. the cell reception on the phone is decent quality 5. antenna is properly placed for very good reception 6. basic SMS works, all the time 7. has been extensively tested to work with a single carrier, any other carrier is no warranty 8. boot time and sh…
I expected this to at least mention the pine phone, the librem, or the Ubuntu phone (which was charming). It’s just about de-googled android and how it doesn’t work very well due to how everything depends on google play services
> ...de-googled android and how it doesn’t work very well due to how everything depends on google play services Even that aspect is wildly overblown in my experience of using Google-free Android devices for the last 12 years. Yes, the thing will prompt you to install some Google-thing because it supposedly does not work without it - there are currently two such notifications on one of my devices telling me so. The th…
It is, mostly. So far, I've still been able to reject having a Google account on new phones. Then I delete the "first time" app Google sticks on there, disable Google services, install F-Droid, and use only F-Droid apps.
Does that still work? It's been three years since I started a new phone?
Someone should do a Linux phone that scales way back: 1. you can dial phone numbers somehow 2. you can talk on the phone 3. you can hear the person on the other line 4. the cell reception on the phone is decent quality 5. antenna is properly placed for very good reception 6. basic SMS works, all the time 7. has been extensively tested to work with a single carrier, any other carrier is no warranty 8. boot time and sh…
The meaning of the word "phone" has shifted in the recent years, and your requirements are a good representation of what that word meant in circa 2007; recently however the requirements 1-8 have so little relevance that it's possible to operate a device without satisfying any of them [0]. The new meaning of the word is an expanded version of #9 whereas it's a connected gadget that runs apps from the well-stocked buil…
For Linux devices, if you have a powerful enough phone (Pine64, can we please have a really beefy PinePhone?), you could bundle Waydroid + Aurora/F-Droid.