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Probably should note that it gets updates outside of its normal product lifecycle in the same way Pixel phones get updates, from and by other vendors. It does n

Probably should note that it gets updates outside of its normal product lifecycle in the same way Pixel phones get updates, from and by other vendors. It does not get firmware/bios updates, will not be microcode patched for spectre/meltdown. An unsupported Pixel phone will not get modem or sensor/wifi firmware updates after support gets dropped. Maybe it will not be a problem, maybe a problem like the sib24[1] issue from a year or so ago will be there. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/l74hto/this_is_apparently_a_result_of_a_network_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/l74hto/this_is_app...

dmm 5y ago
> It does not get firmware/bios updates Surprisingly this is not the case. The x200 can run coreboot and related forks like libreboot: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 > unsupported Pixel phone will not get modem or sensor/wifi firmware updates That's a good point. The removal of 2g/3g made the modems in a lot of phones non-functional. Even without cell support a phone would still be useful as a small wifi tablet if it could run up-to-date software.
- joecool1029 5y ago
  >Surprisingly this is not the case. The x200 can run coreboot and related forks like libreboot: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 Yes, yes, BIOS is supported by third-party vendor. Still leaves the microcode problem. >That's a good point. The removal of 2g/3g made the modems in a lot of phones non-functional. Even without cell support a phone would still be useful as a small wifi tablet if it could run up-to-date software. That's not what I'm talking about. Some phones required a modem update to work around a bug caused by broadcasting a different LTE signalling message they couldn't handle. It would crash the phone's baseband. Similarly some security group like Google Project Zero could figure out vulnerabilities in the modem (maybe unprivileged code execution using specially crafted status messages or something of the like). This is the sort of thing you will not get updates for, and the updates you've received til now won't detail much because SoC vendors have all that shit under NDA.

dmm 5y ago

> It does not get firmware/bios updates Surprisingly this is not the case. The x200 can run coreboot and related forks like libreboot: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 > unsupported Pixel phone will not get modem or sensor/wifi firmware updates That's a good point. The removal of 2g/3g made the modems in a lot of phones non-functional. Even without cell support a phone would still be useful as a small wifi tablet if it could run up-to-date software.

joecool1029 5y ago
>Surprisingly this is not the case. The x200 can run coreboot and related forks like libreboot: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 Yes, yes, BIOS is supported by third-party vendor. Still leaves the microcode problem. >That's a good point. The removal of 2g/3g made the modems in a lot of phones non-functional. Even without cell support a phone would still be useful as a small wifi tablet if it could run up-to-date software. That's not what I'm talking about. Some phones required a modem update to work around a bug caused by broadcasting a different LTE signalling message they couldn't handle. It would crash the phone's baseband. Similarly some security group like Google Project Zero could figure out vulnerabilities in the modem (maybe unprivileged code execution using specially crafted status messages or something of the like). This is the sort of thing you will not get updates for, and the updates you've received til now won't detail much because SoC vendors have all that shit under NDA.