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

[tuxd3v]

(Disclaimer: I am one of the project devs) Maemo Leste might switch to Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster based) in the next month or so as well, for better support for the lima driver and just generally more new sw/drivers. There's likely also a talk at FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/eve..._leste_mobile/

Thanks for that,
It good news!

[tg--]

By that logic the Necunos phone isn't a phone either since there's no GSM modem.

Absolutely true, the Necuons phone isn't a phone, that's just what I've said (and I said it back in November, when the first announcement hit.
I might go a little far; it's just not a mobile phone, and a mobile phone is what we expect today. Building a small (linux/open source) tablet with a SIP client is clearly easy, and we've had that for 13 years, when the Nokia 770 came out.

I did some searching and to me NanoPi NEO and Duo seem pretty darn small. Some Orange boards have 2G. I'm quite certain those manufacturers could come up with a phone too.

Making it an actual mobile phone, in an open enough package, is exactly the hard part.
OpenMoko tried it, and they did reasonably well (but clearly not well enough), and right now, nobody but Purism is trying. Necunos clearly aren't; neither are Pine.

It might not look that slick, but they say the Librem phone isn't gonna be small either.

True, the Librem 5 isn't going to be small, and it's volume will exceed 50% over the next biggest available alternative.
I do think they are doing a laudable job, and they're doing a lot right; but considering their budget, their goals, and the hardware limitations that go hand in hand with both: the Librem will be much larger than any feature-comparable budget phone.

Not to mention the state-of-the-art phones (iPhones, Samsungs, Xiaomis, ...), which will deliver twice the features and triple the performance for half the price and 30% volume.

[caligula]

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.

True, but the chinese can build a similar phone at much lower costs (wages, gov subsidizing).

Easy: You can't make a fully free phone using cheap Chinese chips, certainly not Allwinner ones.
..
Well, that's not a phone - and it won't be.

By that logic the Necunos phone isn't a phone either since there's no GSM modem. I did some searching and to me NanoPi NEO and Duo seem pretty darn small. Some Orange boards have 2G. I'm quite certain those manufacturers could come up with a phone too. It might not look that slick, but they say the Librem phone isn't gonna be small either.

[Wizzup]

Maemo Leste, seems to be very promising.. and they are Devuan ASCII based

(Disclaimer: I am one of the project devs) Maemo Leste might switch to Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster based) in the next month or so as well, for better support for the lima driver and just generally more new sw/drivers. There's likely also a talk at FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/eve..._leste_mobile/

[tuxd3v]

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.

Maemo Leste, seems to be very promising.. and they are Devuan ASCII based

[Luke]

An EXTERNAL modem connected by USB with no DMA access would solve what the Tor Project has called the single biggest security hole in smartphones: access to system RAM by the baseband radio. Not only is the baseband radio a totally closed system to us, it is required by law in many nations (e.g by CALEA in the US) to have backdoor acces for law enforcement. No CALEA compliant device can be trusted with access to your private filesystem, which means all smartphones should isolate the baseband radio to lock governmental spies out of things like the microphone, the camera, GPS, the user's entire filesystem on disk, etc.

Because of this sort of thing, there are a great many things for which I will not use a phone as anything more than a dumb modem passing on https packets from a separate system, one of them being random web surfing. If I have to go someplace I need to deny presence at, it's batteries out for all phones.

[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.

[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.

[caligula]

NC_1 SPECIFICATIONS

Screen resolution is missing.

[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/