I like the idea of a more open phone a lot but dispute the "Smartphones are shit" premise. I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago. The problem is that we don't want to pay what it really costs to have such a great…
As someone who had a few pre-smartphone PDAs: Smartphones absolutely are high powered shit. On paper they're amazing but the ecosystem limits you to scrolling instagram and only a handfull of accepted IMs (iOS struggles with XMPP and IRC for example, something even my hacked DS could do fine with 4MB of ram and a 60Mhz ARM9.) Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a re…
The display is the biggest battery eater, but you can significantly extend lifetime by disabling mobile data and Wifi (use Bluetooth PAN kind of like on a PDA lol) and either undervolting, locking clocks low or disabling the performance cores, there are options. 10-12 hours screen on time even with Wifi on can be achieved.