Rotary Un-Smartphone Kit

Honestly some great ideas (better antenna, e-ink display for basic SMSing, quick dial, probably huge battery life), but they can't be serious about the rotary dial.

> Previously, phones with physical keys required a clamshell (flip) form-factor to prevent unintended dialing. Rotary dials are naturally resistant to butt dialing.

You can solve butt dialing with a number of ways, like another hardware switch. This solution seems much more cumbersome, and I can't believe this is not done simply out of novelty.

You are right it does have a baseband processor. It is using a uBlox TOBY-R20[02] chip to act as one. That runs some proprietary code written by who knows who and it can act against your interest.

There are some mitigations in place: They claim to have a physical cut-off switch for the microphone. They also say that the power switch is an actual slide switch. If these are correctly implemented you can be certain when is the phone able to listen to you, and when is it properly off.

Also it is much more likely that the AtMega2560 acting as the application processor is properly isolated from the baseband processor. (If for no other reason that the developers would have to go out of their way to program/wire it in such a manner to be half as vulnerable as most other phone's application processors are.)

That being said the text of the product page focuses on the usability of the phone not on the privacy or security aspects. Out of the 9 positives they list, only 1 talks about privacy/security. This would indicate the focus of the people who built it.

Just to be clear on this: There is nothing wrong with focusing on UX. Not every product has to be laser focused on privacy/security. It is clearly made by a small team. (Perhaps only by a single person?) They wanted to make a phone which causes less distractions to the phone's users. All the power to them.