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A closed-source Google-developed OS for feature phones. Obviously it's the best spend DoD money so far. Just 20 millions. You need to track poor people too.
How difficult would this be to add GIPO to? This crushes the Raspi3 for the value.
I was looking a bit into this. It seems that KAI os is not an opensource project. Plus the OS is flashed into the ROM of these phones so its also very difficult to install a new OS reliably. So even if you got the GIPO to work with the phone how would you actually program it? Kai OS has a device api [1] but as far as I can tell it does not give you access to linux shell.
If the phone has a usb slot you can use a usb gipo board [2]
[1] https://developer.kaiostech.com/api
[2]https://numato.com/product/8-channel-usb-gpio-module-with-an...
Any word on US availability? There are plenty of people who don’t need an entire iPhone, or can’t comprehend one due to age or other handicaps. It’s good to have choices.
You can buy a Nokia 8110 4G in the U.S.A. IIRC, and it's powered by KaiOS.
Give me that phone with monochrome display, the usability of Nokia's original OS and modern network connectivity and I'd jump at it.
How difficult would this be to add GIPO to? This crushes the Raspi3 for the value.
In practice though, unless you plan to deploy a lot of them, as a hobbyist, your time is likely more valuable than any hardware so it seems reasonable to just go with the most popular platform.
I'd buy a few of these for my kids.
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.
Was Firefox OS targetting this kind of phone though? I thought it was trying to be a touch-screen smartphone OS.
However, the effort required to enable a non-touch UI would have been a small fraction of the overall FirefoxOS effort. Something Mozilla could have responded to, if the team was intact.
The article says it supports WhatsApp, but the KaiOS publication clarifies it does not. In many countries, that's a no go.
Also the question is not really “does it support WhatsApp”, but “does WhatsApp support this OS”. Which may eventually be the case if there's enough market share for that.
[1] https://www.bgr.in/news/jiophone-kaios-surpasses-ios-india-s...