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> Mostly I care about phone calls, texting, and web browsing. "Easy, Easy, Brutally Difficult." If all you want is phone and text, there's no shortage of chea
by Syonyk 2y ago
> Mostly I care about phone calls, texting, and web browsing.
"Easy, Easy, Brutally Difficult."
If all you want is phone and text, there's no shortage of cheaper flip phone/candybar phones out there that handle it, though I will caution you that older versions of KaiOS, at least, struggle badly with handling any sort of modern text quantities (a few hundred messages on a phone on a KaiOS 2.x device lagged it badly enough that it stopped alerting me to new messages or phone calls, and I had to trim it down regularly, though even then it struggled).
I'm a fan of the Sonim stuff, it runs Android Go, and is properly stout.
Web browsing, though. That's hard. If you want a simple phone, your best bet is to carry a tablet or laptop for that sort of thing, and just hotspot off the phone if/when needed. Most current featurephones have a thing called a web browser, and it ranges from "almost useless" to "literally can't render the modern web." That's before you sort out using it on what is typically a 320x240 pixel display. You're way better off just carrying something different for that need.
- numpad0 2y agoIsn't that the other way around? I thought voice is usually the most complicated to implement, especially in 4G/5G which uses modified SIP/RTP. Mic and speaker has to work too. Web browsing OTOH at bare minimum require just simulated PPP over AT command interface, touchscreen, and Chromium.
- tonyg 2y agoAs recently as the Samsung Galaxy S7, Pinephone, etc., voice calls are done with high-level commands too. All you have to do is get the soundcard mixer settings right. Figuring out the correct settings is tricky but once you have them it's plain sailing. Web browsers have a very broad interface with the underlying system. Speaking from experience: getting calls and text working is much easier than getting a browser going in a new environment.
- fsflover 2y ago> Web browsers have a very broad interface with the underlying system. What do you mean? My Librem 5 just runs desktop Firefox since day one. Calls and texts were a problem initially though.
- tonyg 2y agoFirefox depends on many many parts of the operating system. Calls and texts, not so much. Starting from scratch, a kernel and little else, getting calls and texts working is easy compared to getting Firefox ported.
- fidotron 2y agoPeople, including a lot of very tenured web developers, radically underestimate how big browsers are in surface area now. Any of WebGL, WebRTC, the MediaStreams, Web Audio or WebGPU by themselves are enormous, and on mobile SoCs will rely heavily on device specific drivers to accelerate their functions, or the battery runs out in 5 minutes.
- Syonyk 2y agoIf you're building your own cell modem, then, probably. In terms of "finding hardware that can do the following things," pretty much any cell phone sold will support voice and text - though some don't do a great job with MMS. The web browser requires orders of magnitude more resources than voice/text, though. A Nokia from 20 years ago, with... I actually can't find how much RAM or storage, had no problems with voice or text. Wouldn't run a browser at all, though. I was admittedly of the impression that most of the voice work was handled by the baseband, though. I've not built my own phones, unfortunately. I just use some basic flip phones for mobile use.