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Furilabs Linux Phone

(furilabs.com)
223 points nikodunk | 4 comments | 14 Oct 24 16:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.795s | source
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ninetyninenine ◴[14 Oct 24 17:57 UTC] No.41840028[source]▶
What I want is quality to the level of flagship android phones or the iphone with the ability to plug it in to a keyboard, mouse and screen and have it function as my laptop as well.

One single integrated experience. I think everyone wants this. We have the technology we have the demand, it's just companies who make the high quality phones want to completely lock down the market.

You would think the free market would produce a company that would tackle this issue but barrier to entry is waay to high so essentially we have small companies trying to get into this space but they are only creating sub-par products because they can't make something as good as an iphone.

It's basically a legal monopoly. Companies can't get into it because the technology and capital required are way to high and only super mega corps like samsung and apple can pull it off...

Closest thing I've seen to this product I'm looking for is the steam deck. I would buy a steam deck phone if it had the quality of a pixel/iphone device.

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whyowhy3484939 ◴[14 Oct 24 18:28 UTC] No.41840391[source]▶
> 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.

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ForHackernews ◴[14 Oct 24 18:53 UTC] No.41840630[source]▶
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

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1. rjsw ◴[14 Oct 24 19:12 UTC] No.41840837[source]▶
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.

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2. normie3000 ◴[14 Oct 24 19:44 UTC] No.41841132[source]▶
Wow. Whatsapp struggles on my iphone 13; how's performance on your Nokia?!
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3. rjsw ◴[14 Oct 24 19:58 UTC] No.41841278[source]▶
Works fine to receive text messages and a few pictures.
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4. lapinot ◴[15 Oct 24 13:05 UTC] No.41848160{3}[source]▶
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.