The Necunos Mobile Linux Smartphone With KDE Option Preparing To Ship - Without Modem

[Vistaus]

This guys, could very well put Sailfish Os on it!
And it would be a nice phone..

Yeah, if they'd put Sailfish 1 on it... I didn't like Sailfish anymore after 1.

[Vistaus]

1200 euro for an i.MX6 device that is virtually functionally useless for its intended purpose? Thatsca hard sell

I know, right? The Planet Computing Cosmo Communicator is a much, much better deal and you can easily put KDE Plasma Mobile on it yourself as it allows multibooting out-of-the-box.

[sarmad]

"Extreme tracking protection; no SIM module...Wi-Fi, Ethernet and other IP connectivity"

Where is the source of this quote? And what does it actually mean? Does it mean the device has no sim and no wifi as well? From English perspective, this statement is saying that the device has no connectivity at all.

[LaeMing]

Other than the price (ouchie, but it is specifically a small-run dev platform so fair enough), something that could serve as the equivalent of a Pi/Beagle/Odroid with screen, battery, etc. all properly integrated into a compact unit, is something I would have multiple uses for. Possibly when (if) the modem-included version comes out some day I could pick some of theses up cheap!

[Ray_o]

NC_1 SPECIFICATIONS

PLATFORM:

Chipset: ARM® Cortex®-A9 NXP i.MX6
CPU: Quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9
Memory: 1GB
Storage: 8GB
Battery: 3500 mAh
GPU: Vivante (Etnaviv with hardware acceleration)
Display: 5.0"
Body: Aluminium
Camera: 5 MP 1.4" CONNECTORS:

Audio: 3.5mm audio jack
Charging: Micro-USB, Data transfer disabled
Microphone: Built-in microphone
Speakers: 2 Built-in speaker CONNECTIVITY:

WLAN: WiFi (via SDIO) WL1801 (2.4 GHz)
Ethernet: High speed 100Mb/s
Serial: Internal SOFTWARE:

Operating Systems: Multiple community driven operating systems to choose from.
Closed source firmware with memory access: NO
Binary blobs: NO
Locked bootloader: NO

1GB RAM, hmm i am not sure how bad this is.

[Machine]

Too much, for too little for me, I so want a phone that is free, this isn't prime time ready though, might be interesting to see where they go from this.

[caligula]

Like I said above, the only reasons it's understandable is because it's a first-gen open product. What I didn't add was that its intended target is developers and open source advocates; that's usually an overlap of people with excess money to spend since programming pays more than working at a 7-11.

Gen 2 should be lower in price and be made for consumers. If it isn't...then damn...

Librem 5 costs $599 and has i.MX8 and phone features. It's strange that this old piece of shit hardware is twice as expensive.

Why not make a phone using cheap chinese chips? Allwinner?

Oh ok, nice: https://itsfoss.com/pinebook-kde-smartphone/

[caligula]

NC_1 SPECIFICATIONS

Screen resolution is missing.

[Wizzup]

Librem 5 costs $599 and has i.MX8 and phone features. It's strange that this old piece of shit hardware is twice as expensive.

Why not make a phone using cheap chinese chips? Allwinner?

Oh ok, nice: https://itsfoss.com/pinebook-kde-smartphone/

Yes, the pinephone also looks promising. Maemo Leste developers received a devkit, and it's kinda working at this point, they will present their phone devkit at FOSDEM. With lima driver now starting to work OKish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihCVsaEMNzY) it'll also be quite open, I imagine.

[tg--]

Librem 5 costs $599 and has i.MX8 and phone features. It's strange that this old piece of shit hardware is twice as expensive.

It should be mentioned, that Purism likely isn't making any money at the $600 price point, and very likely not at $700 either.
It's a very expensive package with very expensive parts sourced in small volumes.
Necunos clearly isn't a workable concept, but they do actually give realistic prices, at which they might make a small profit.
Certainly won't help establishing it though, while Purism might honestly have a chance.

Why not make a phone using cheap chinese chips? Allwinner?

Easy: You can't make a fully free phone using cheap Chinese chips, certainly not Allwinner ones.
What you can make is a very cheap android phone - but the Chinese are already doing this; and they're doing it in huge quantities. Nobody could possibly compete.

Oh ok, nice: https://itsfoss.com/pinebook-kde-smartphone/

Well, that's not a phone - and it won't be.
While this is actually a hardware design company, and has some experience working with Chinese manufacturers producing low-cost hardware based on Chinese reference-designs, they can't produce a phone, which is over an order of magnitude more expensive to develop.
You can't just slap a cheap USB-modem on a board and call it a day, you have to integrate it. Purism is right now learning this the hard way.

There is a reason why they can produce Rockchip and Allwinner based boards: they are large, very simple, and Rockchip as well as Allwinner are excellent in designing and integrating cheap hardware and happy to sell this as a service to everyone who has the funding for a large production run (which the about 1 million USD Pine collected on Kickstarter enabled).
There's barely passable open source support, not carried by Rockchip, Allwinner or even Pine; it's carried by a community who worked for years on making this happen.

What Allwinner and Rockchip are not as good in: offering that same service for phones.
There's one Chinese company which is excellent here: Mediatek. They can do this by doing business on massive scale, phones produced in the millions for the low-end market.
They also have their own, very cheap, modems, which are generally tightly integrated in the system and rarely used outside of an all-Mediatek-platform.
Open Source support is terrible, almost unworkable.

So Pine could do a cheap "phone" based on a Mediatek platform (and nothing else IMHO). But to use it as a phone, you'll have to use their proprietary android RIL implementation, and lose the ability to run mainline-kernels. If you want open source, you can't use it as a phone. You might as well just buy one of their existing android smartphones, not quite at 100 USD, but not much more.