Furilabs Linux Phone

> I think everyone wants this.

You asked for it. I don't want that. I don't want an "integrated experience" and "flagship quality". The first sounds juvenile and the second sounds unnecessarily expensive and probably containing shit I don't need, like fancy cameras to look good on my nonexistent socials.

What I want is a simple, slow, old, efficient, simple phone with the interface of an 80s era 8bit computer that can actually, imagine this, make and, to complicate matters even further, even take calls.

I basically want an open source dumb phone. Do these exist? If not, why not focus on this first? Why go for fancy cameras and apps when we can't even make calls? Looking at your PinePhone.

These do (or did) exist: feature phones shipped with FirefoxOS. Almost no one bought them and the effort was widely seen as a failure, although KaiOS enjoys ongoing success in the developing world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Firefox_OS_devic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

>I basically want an open source dumb phone. Do these exist? If not, why not focus on this first? Why go for fancy cameras and apps when we can't even make calls? Looking at your PinePhone.

Your dream is achievable and has been achieved. PinePhone for example.

I obviously don't mean everyone everyone. More like the overwhelming majority of people.

> that can actually, imagine this, make and, to complicate matters even further, even take calls

Showing how different different people are. I've probably made... 20? ish? phone calls in the last decade. (I'm 46.)

I have one and it very much struggles to make and especially to receive calls and is still trying to be smart. PinePhone is definitely not a dumb phone. It's expensive as well.

To me a simple, dumb, open source device that can easily be manufactured in all kinds of conditions all over the world sounds like a dream for actual, practical purposes. Like, for example, again, calling. To some degree I have the same issues with "smart watches". Simple, open source, dumb smart watches with just a smidge of 8bit CPU goodness to display, say, something simple like a word or even a letter on the screen would be quite useful. I know there is some movement in that arena using ESP32s but I am not particularly impressed. Alas, alas. Why do we as a civilization tend to go for the extremes and not just get our basic shit together first?

I was being slightly obtuse and I understood perfectly well that you meant all reasonable people. If I can't be obtuse and pedantic on HN though, where else?

I am using a KaiOS phone, a Nokia 6300 4G. It works well as a 4G WiFi hotspot for a laptop and as a small phone for making calls and sending texts. Have a few apps on it for mapping as well as using the browser occasionally.

The KaiOS WhatsApp app will stop working next year though.

Holy moly, you must have very different life than most people I guess. I am from the younger generation which supposedly avoids making old-style phone calls as much as possible and I don't think I know anyone who has made less than 100 calls in the last decade.

I half agree. I dont need the bullshit bells and whistles. However a good camera doesn't mean you want to post on instagram or tiktok - maybe you just want a memory of a trip you went on or technical detail of something you want to document. People took pictures before social media.

Most every phone can already do what we want but the hardware is undocumented or locked behind NDA and the firmware is hostile. Without those locks the gigacorps cant keep you in the data-mining garden. We wont have open phones until this thinking changes. Keep dreaming until then.

Wow. Whatsapp struggles on my iphone 13; how's performance on your Nokia?!

Works fine to receive text messages and a few pictures.

LTE set that back by a lot. For years there were no VoLTE implementations in common use other than stuffs on Android. Even those had compatibility issues and lots of carriers still block unapproved clients trying to register on VoLTE.

For 3G, you could always do that. You only needed the right modem module with voice call support and audio I/O, like bare PCM pins, and a host micro to handle AT commands.

> there were no VoLTE implementations in common use other than stuffs on Android

What's wrong with the Android one - is it not permissively licensed?

I think the biggest problem of Linux phones is the community's obsession with trying (and failing) to reimplement (multiple times, in parallel) things that Android does really well and can be used as-is.

That's why the PinePhone or Librem 5 still can't even match the usability (at basic things like phone or camera or battery life) of a 2010-era Android phone, despite having similar hardware.

You want a Linux phone that actually works? Start with an AOSP-based phone and provide manufacturer-approved root and escape hatch such as first-party terminal and Wayland/X server app to run Linux apps.

Over time, you can slowly replace Android components with their Linux desktop counterparts when they're ready (or the other way around - the Android bits can just be the commonly-accepted solution to specific problems in Linux - even desktop - distros), but at least you're starting from a solid base.

> What's wrong with the Android one - is it not permissively licensed?

It is not, AOSP based distributions have to kang it from vendor builds. Qualcomm's is mostly standardized but Samsung wrote their own stack and voLTE/voNR won't work on any custom roms.

> That's why the PinePhone or Librem 5 still can't even match the usability (at basic things like phone or camera or battery life) of a 2010-era Android phone, despite having similar hardware.

They most certainly do NOT have similar hardware. You're wrong on thinking it's a software problem when the hardware being interfaced with is notoriously proprietary. The PinePhone and Librem phones are using self-contained quectel modems connected via different interfaces. They are nothing like the integrated soc's of nearly every other device on the market. This dramatically impacts battery life and stability and I don't think it will ever be a solved problem when building devices this way.

Same for me, I am 50 and would happily carry a phone sized tablet without call caps at all. I never need to call or receive call; send me an email or hit me up on a chat channel.

disclaimer: just an old grumpy customer, not an industry expert.

There were pointless debates around ITU-T and 3GPP as to whether the LTE is 3.5G or 3.9G or 4G next to the pink fact elephant that _it_ is going to be _the_ next cell standard anyway. That hot debate delayed voice call discussions to post-launch matter that eventually coagulated as the VoLTE.

The Voice-over-LTE was a total kludge together that were(ARE) carrier specific implementations. In Japan at least, it seemed to have had push from KDDI, esp. with hindsight that NTT docomo and Fujitsu, both formerly influential in 3G, both seemed on fire majority of that timeframe, while Nokia being a supernova beyond fire. It would be very natural if Samsung would have made vital contributions, but I don't have much informational pressure from that direction. VoLTE is phone company mannerisms, remnants of retro-futuristic media features of 3G, weird spaghetti codes from carrier labs, and international call exchange system, all homogenized in a blender; the artefacts were co-developed pair of server and client implementations that are standardized in the way there aren't many implementations but not something carefully spec-worked before construction for interoperability. That all happened ~a decade ago. Some point between Android 4 to 10.

I suppose it was all retconned into 3GPP standards after action, but the whole stack is still like a lobotomized Android call app and private fork of Asterisk embedded into the cellular core monstrosity. I guess embedded modem people(like Quectel) had finally got to port functions into modem chip firmwares so they can make calls, after someone done it for non-smartphones(KaiOS, Smarterphone...), I think around 2019 +/- 1 year.

What I'm trying to say is, VoLTE is complicated. It's something like SIM-authenticated SIP/RTP over IP under IP, not even regular 3G data session let alone SIP-VoIP on Layer 3 UDP/IP.

Osmocom project Wiki summarizes it better than I[1]: "Voice over LTE is an adaptation by 3GPP to use IMS over an LTE cellular network. The LTE EPS (Evolved Packet System) provides the functionality of the underlying IP-CAN. ... IMS is much more than normal SIP/RTP. And in addition to that, there is a tight integration between the LTE system and the IMS on top of it."

And it's supposed to be the core feature of a phone, "not".toupper() a party trick... There are better things to do in life for most people.

1: https://osmocom.org/projects/foss-ims-client/wiki/VoLTE

I always wonder why your generation avoids such calls... Voice calls are so much more efficient to get the things you want from the person you call...

I think those very total attention expected during phone calls, and the speed at which it happens, contributes to a higher level of anxiety compared to texting. The younger generation hate these elevated stresses and prefer more async communication

I beg to differ. Tried to use a kaios nokia 800 tough. Firefox/KaiOS using a stupid kind of webview for every UI, you get two consequences: first, everything is ugly: wrong padding everywhere, complex layout with non-integer number of list items fitting on screen (this is important, vertical list is the primary widget on small screen dumbphones). And second: everything is sluggish. My true "series 30" nokia launches app instantly, whereas i'm sure the SoC is order of magnitudes slower.

So the UX definitely shows complete absence of culture of design in this kind of space (eg gameboy UI design, classic dumbphone UI, ...). Small screens need very simple widgets (most importantly grid and vertical list), hand made paddings and proper space optimizations, most likely some bitmap font tailored to the resolution.. You can't just slap some dynamic layout and expect it to work nicely on such a small screen. Everything vectorized will be both costly and of dubious rendering quality, etc..

And of course these things only have "decent", but definitely not "1 month scale" battery life. I guess LTE is the real culprit here.