Necunos Mobile: A New Open-Source Linux Phone With KDE Plasma Mobile

[starshipeleven]

if they serve the niche they are designed for that is a success. Not everything needs to be pervasive and in every pocket to be considered successful. Not everything needs to take over the world.

By the same logic, also XFCE is a failure as it didn't take over and extinguish most other DEs. (nudge nudge wink wink)

[SpyroRyder]

People that "can just buy any old mid-range Android" are not in their target audience and will probably never be.

Most of the stuff you mention is horribly expensive if you don't have the scales of Samsung or Huawei or other large manufacturers.

Agreed about most of the specs. that aint a $400 phone in most places, even from a big company, but he got one thing right. This should come with type c. you should only still be using MicroUSB now if you have an IOT or really constrained device.

[tg--]

I couldn't be happier about a open source phone finally appearing.
Thus it pains me a lot to say it, but: this isn't it.

There is a reason why Purism went with the i.MX8, and it isn't performance (though performance is of course a huge difference as well).
There simply is no mobile capable i.MX6.
These SoCs were never used in any mobile and FreeScale never made a mobile-capable i.MX6.
Since the i.MX6 is quite old (Samsung S III LTE in 2013 would be a good comparison), to run Plasma it will run at significant load most of the time, and draw huge amounts of power.
NXP now makes the i.MX8 in a somewhat mobile capable version (i.MX8M) - and even though it won't be used in any other phone ever, it at least will be usable.

Generic specs and a generic mockup don't inspire any further hope.
That they don't have plans for a cellular modem is even more odd. To be fair: it's hard.
Purism as well has looked for a long time, and found SIMCom, which is actually the best choice - though it isn't a great choice, but might be workable.

Would anyone really be willing to carry around a WiFi only SIP-phone just to have KDE? Sorry, I don't buy it. People use cellular for a reason.
Right now this is just a bunch of hot air, not a workable concept, or even a partial concept.

I don't have great hope in Purism either, since they have a daunting task ahead of them - but they very clearly did their homework, and actually have a workable concept.
They just might pull it off, and if they do, I'll happily spend any amount of money they ask for to get one.

Necuno on the other hand just don't have anything tangible and the best they could do would be riding on Purisms trail and try to copy it as best they can.
That's just not enough, and in the best case just pulls funding from Purism, and in the worst, achieves nothing.
But it runs Plasma. Great, erm, I guess.

UI is easy, OpenMoko has been there and done that, actually decently considering the circumstances.
Cellular hardware is the hard part.
And making it a phone, not a tiny tablet (we've had tons of those, N800 anyone?) is the really hard part.

[starshipeleven]

Agreed about most of the specs. that aint a $400 phone in most places, even from a big company, but he got one thing right. This should come with type c. you should only still be using MicroUSB now if you have an IOT or really constrained device.

1000000% agreement there. USB-C is just a connector, and you can have a USB 2.0 port on it fine so you can have a USB-C connector even if the chip does not support USB 3.0.

[CTown]

The average $80 tablet has better hardware... no bluetooth is a dealbreaker probably not difficult to add via one of the USB HSIC ports. I won't be supprised if that iMX. 6 chip is EOL before it starts shipping.

You are probably thinking of the countless tablets/TV boxes with a quadcore Cortex A53 cpu and usually a Mali GPU. The problem is that these boards cost like $15-20 to projects like these. Maybe that is more than what this project wants to pay. However, Pine64 will use a similar board to these cheap tablets for their upcoming phone. The tablet version, the Pinebook, runs KDE Neon pretty well already.

The other issue is the GPU driver. Mali GPUs are not very free. Snapdragon's GPU, Adreno, does have free drivers. However, the boards are expensive. The older IMX boards do have free GPU drivers. It makes me think that we need to find a person as talented as Rob Clark (who makes the free driver for Snapdragon SOCs) and help fund a driver for a newer Mali GPU (Like Mali G7X line).

I remember running desktop Linux on a RPi 2 with a single core Cortex-A7 CPU. The single core in the RPi2 killed the experience but at least this project will use a quadcore.

[Azrael5]

A quad core i.MX6 and a 5.5" display aren't hardware data?
Running the 4.14 kernel and KDE mobile aren't software data?

Of course, there is more to know, but this is still enough to pique someone's interest or not.

it's a cortex A9. Is it a bit old, don't you?

[schmidtbag]

it's a cortex A9. Is it a bit old, don't you?

I agree - the phone certainly doesn't pique my interest.