> What I'd like to see is a very basic cheap open mobile device
Raspberry Pi and a battery?
> It might even have to shun making calls because of the proprietary hardware/software stack.
The cellular side can be on a separate baseband processor that talks to the outside world using good old fashioned AT commands[1] pretending to be a serial device. At that point you don't care how proprietary it is since any kernel and userspace can work with it. The current proprietary problem area is graphics (binary blobs abound) and often some other pieces (eg bluetooth, system initialization and bootloaders)
OpenMoko[2] did do open phones, although IIRC there was one proprietary piece.
> If there's a sustainable and usable open solution, please comment.
I'm looking at the Jolla/Sailfish phone. Seems to be a lot of ex-Nokia engineers trying to reboot the N9/Maemo. They're also shipping with fork of Dalvik (though I don't know how well that will work now that many APIs are moving into Play Services). I couldn't say much about the details, but at the least I'm happier buying a phone from a company that makes its money from selling phone hardware and software, rather than from data aggregation and advertising.
>You do realize that phone is only available for preorder?
Yes, it is only for preorder, but the devkit already exists [0].
> They may not even be around in 3 or 5 years.
If they manage to make the final version of the phone (which is quite likely), it won't matter anymore, since the OS is just GNU/Linux. Correspondingly, the updates do not so much depend on the phone manufacturers.
>But I kinda just want a phone that just starts a linux based operating system like a PC, and lets me do everything I can on my linux PC in a touch-centric way.
I liked my Nokia N900 and kept up for a while with attempts to keep its Maemo going after Nokia abandoned it. However, a decade later Maemo has bitrotted and its dev community has dwindled away. Nowadays the Phosh interface (i.e. the Librem phone, or Mobian running on the PinePhone) is seen as the most promising Free Software choice in the long term. Sailfish OS is also actively maintained, but its UI layer is closed source.
> But I kinda just want a phone that just starts a linux based operating system like a PC, and lets me do everything I can on my linux PC in a touch-centric way.
Maru runs Linux in a container alongside Android so you can have the best of both worlds. Hook up to an external monitor with a BT keyboard and mouse and you have a full Debian-based desktop at your disposal.
Maru only supports older hardware (Nexus 5, Nexus 7) at the moment, but newer devices (Nexus 5X/6P, HTC 10, Moto Z2 Force, Galaxy S9) have working ports on our forum and should have official images available soon: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/maru-os-dev
We're an open-source project too, so you can even attempt your own port if you own an unsupported device: https://github.com/maruos/maruos
Unfortunately the baseband modem is still unfree, but at least it's isolated over the USB bus, versus having direct memory access as many phones do. Unfortunately no phone has a free, legal modem.
Anyways, I'm more excited about the prospect of the phone itself being completely free. In their own words:
> Not a single line of closed code will have to run on the main CPU to be able to use the Neo900.
Using free telephony stacks like FSO or one from QtMoko, FLOSS Linux drivers will be available for every single component.
In order to get 3D acceleration working, which is not necessary to operate the device, closed drivers would be needed.
> You always have the option to build your own phone.
That sounds factually false to me.
Seems to me that I can't do it. Others have tried, how's that going?
For a start I don't think the components are easily available. Both software and hardware.
> "With easily available components and open source software"
For me the modern definition of a phone is "a device that can make voice calls, message people on their required messaging network, and give me access to my bank accounts".
I don't think I can actually do that with easily available components and open source software right now. It would be interesting to be proved wrong.
> If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck.
Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
> I was thinking of getting a ZTE Open to play with Firefox OS, but am a bit deterred by reports of how poor its build quality is.
It's not that bad overall, especially when you consider that it's a $79 phone.
I'm glad it's cheap. It's meant for development and testing, not daily use. I have one, and while I think it shows huge potential, I would not rely on a Firefox OS phone as a daily driver yet.
> I would say that the Nokia N9 UI was well designed, but the phone or its software was so slow it was almost unusable. If I had paid full price for mine I would have been pissed.
This is not at all consistent with my N9 experience.
But it was a disappointment in terms of not delivering source for a reproducible FOSS firmware a community could form around and iteratively improve, nor did they facilitate easily replacing the OS/distro.
If the N9 had the pinephone'seasily replaced 100% FOSS firmware via SD cards and community, we'd be in a very different place today.
> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today?
The idea of it was great but the phone itself was pretty frustrating.
The idea is that it was a little bitty linux tablet, with something of an open source community behind it, that could also make phone calls. I explained some of my thoughts in this arstechnica thread[0] from 4 years ago.
But the reality once I got the phone was it was just slow and frustrating to use. Aspects of it were great (it multitasked the best of all the phones of its day), but over time it's glitchyness (hanging up on calls instead of answering them, because the buttons jumped around), and the lack of multi touch brought me down.
I still have my N900 in a box somewhere. If anyone in the Boston area wants it, ping me (email address on my profile here) and I'd be happy to give it to you.
> Spent the last hour looking at android phones. There are so many it is overwhelming
I get what you mean, there are dozens of manufacturers, each with dozens of SKU's. I wish more companies would learn from apple and limit the number of SKU's available (especially laptop manufacturers).
I've been using android since 1.6, but it's increasingly becoming google integrated OS, I think for my next phone I'll be considering ubuntu and other options.
It would be nice if we had mobile and desktop OSes that didn't get increasingly bloated with time, slowed down, were abandoned by the vendors and were messy in plethora of other ways.
My Android phone doesn't get security updates by the manufacturer, just a few years after the release, which is horrible in the case of RCEs (like the WebP one). I can't install a newer version or a custom ROM because of a locked down bootloader (without exploits) and even then drivers are a big issue. Some of my older hardware wouldn't even be compatible with desktop OSes like Windows 11 because of the whole TPM debacle.
Other than that, digging up my old Android phone with Android 2.1 on it, or maybe my old E8400 CPU from 2008 would yield really bad experience in both cases. Could devices from over a decade ago be viable choices, if the software didn't get exponentially more wasteful? Perhaps, but that's not the reality that we live in, neither for desktop PCs, nor phones.
Is this really what's special about it? IMO what matters is that it runs free software to the greatest extent possible.
I suspect that most people who will be buying it don't care whether it runs Linux or a BSD or even something like Minix, as long is it presents the familiar POSIX-like interface, has good software available (GNOME, Plasma Mobile), and is loyal to the user instead of to a coroporation [== the user has control over it and can hack on it].
> There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp.
Really? I remember spending quite a while comparing specs before getting an ASUS A730W. I remember a few interesting-sounding Zauruses (Zaurodes?) that were never released in the west, but nothing I could actually buy.
> Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based.
True - but they really were crappy. Whereas my PDA ran real programs - it was relatively easy to port and build existing C++ code (the UI toolkit was different, but all UI toolkits were different in those days).
I ordered a new old-stock Nexus 5X to run KDE Plasma on. Fuck both Google and Apple. I hope the Purism and Pinephone actually get released as well so we have more real Linux options.
I hate we live in a world with totally non-standard mobile hardware. Back in the day you could wipe Windows and run Linux on nearly anything. Maybe you would only get VESA graphics or text, but it would at least boot.
PostmarketOS is trying to make a dent in it, but we still have huge gaps in hardware support.
100% FLOSS mobile phones are available for sale since 2007 :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko
The current revision (GTA04A5, ARM Cortex A8 1GHz) can be ordered at http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04
The Nokia N950 was also very open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
There are also other also-run phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...
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