6 ms·

I think it's time for us to go back to having mobile phones (texting, virtual credit cards, tethered wifi hotspots etc). separate from mobile storage and comput

I think it's time for us to go back to having mobile phones (texting, virtual credit cards, tethered wifi hotspots etc). separate from mobile storage and compute (mp3 players, cameras etc.). The modern mobile ecosystem is selling games consoles when the nerds want mobile Unix workstations.

mathiaspoint 1y ago
Modem Manager on Linux handles ppp and texting (even MMS if you're willing to build mmsd which isn't easy) with just a USB modem. You don't need a phone at all. All phones have these days is "the app ecosystem" which is designed and optimized just to rent you out to corporations. Exposing yourself to it is almost always a loss.
- mbac32768 1y ago
  Do you actually carry around a Linux laptop with a USB modem instead of a smartphone? Can you blog about it?
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    Yes I do. I don't really maintain a blog but I've been thinking about writing some articles on my personal site about how I have everything set up.
bapak 1y ago
The nerds are the minority. If you want hackable machines vote with your wallet and/or with your politicians.
pharrington 1y ago
Nope. Its time to have full ownership over our handheld computers.
- garciasn 1y ago
  There are options out there for you to do this. Hell, build your own. That’s what nerds did long ago. Keep up the same effort today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - ori_b 1y ago
    There's a lot of effort going into making it impossible to interact with the rest of the world if you run your own code. Look up remote attestation.
    - garciasn 1y ago
      Linux changed the landscape of Unix. We can do it with phones too. The defeatist attitude, while potentially true, didn’t land us where we are today server side.
      - ori_b 1y ago
        A purely technical solution is insufficient. Put on your suit and prepare to play politics.
      - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
        Linux was a one-time anomaly in a much simpler, wilder era without overwhelmingly dominant incumbents in the spaces that Linux eventually took over.
      - saulpw 1y ago
        Linux was created in 1993, when the computing world was still understandable by a single human. This is no longer the case, hence why we haven't seen any new (hacker) operating systems since then.
  - echelon 1y ago
    > There are options out there for you to do this. That's like the tiny moments of freedom that Winston Smith has in 1984 before he is captured and tortured. We live in a mobile computing dictatorship. There isn't time, money, or energy for millions of people to do this. And so we are taxed, corralled, and treated like cattle. Google and Apple own smartphones and nobody can do anything about it. The only solution is government dismantlement of the Google/Apple monopoly. That starts with mandates for web installs of native apps by default, without hidden settings menus or scare walls.
throwaway106382 1y ago
Here you go: https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/ https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/
- dotancohen 1y ago
  No CardDAV sync. How do you get contacts on and off the device?
  - tokai 1y ago
    You use vCard. https://www.punkt.ch/repofiles/14440-MP02%20backing%20up%20contacts%20EN%20DE%20IT.pdf https://www.punkt.ch/repofiles/14440-MP02%20backing%20up%20c...
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      With over 900 contacts? Even just my personal CardDAV account has close to 200 contacts.
      - tokai 1y ago
        CardDAV is an extension of vCard. vCard can handle an arbitrary amount of contacts. But who knows, you definitely have more experience in using address book protocols than me.
        dotancohen 1y ago
        I don't claim to know much. But with multiple contact lists and many groups in each list, CardDAV is a must.
dotancohen 1y ago
Find a dumb phone that: 1. Presents a mobile hotspot, and 2. Supports CardDAV so I can actually sync my contacts 3. Records calls There were none the last time I tried, about three years ago. And that even ignores the issue of trying to dial a number from a link on a web page or in a document.
- baq 1y ago
  > Presents a mobile hotspot I guess you can get a mobile hotspot and a dumb phone separately. Looks like 5G Wifi 6 APs are available for ~$100.
- omnimus 1y ago
  I am not 100% sure but my partner has the nokia “bannana” phone and i think it supports both. It for sure supports 4g hotspot and caldav but i think even carddav. Kinda sad that it's KaiOS the FirefoxOS fork. One can only wonder what would have happened if Mozilla kept with the project till now. There is huge wave of people wanting less absorbing devices nowdays.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  It’s so strange that out of the box CalDAV and CardDAV support is rare for mobile devices. iPhones are the best somehow, with Android being heavily Google-focused and support is totally absent on non-smart platforms, which is the perfect opposite of what one might expect! It’d make way more sense if the more open platforms were built around open standards, but somehow here we are.
  - xethos 1y ago
    It's "rare" in that Apple, BlackBerry / RIM, and (seemingly, though I never used it) Windows Mobile all supported it. It was only ever Google that didn't The fact they now make up half the market is what makes it rare, not that other mobile OS' didn't make it available
- numpad0 1y ago
  There was a multiple years of gap between rollout of voice call specification on LTE(VoLTE) and launches of first featurephone operating system supporting it. Android and iOS were only implementation available for a while. For this reason, practically all "featurephone" style phones that supports voice call, except very few, runs AOSP. At the point where your product runs AOSP, you might as well launch it as a low end smartphone, which is what a lot of vendor do.
Almondsetat 1y ago
The ratio between nerds and "normal" consumers is pretty high, and being a nerd does not automatically mean you care about having a "mobile unix workstation" (what unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone?), and even if you have one it doesn't mean you'll actually find a use for it. It's safe to say that the market is irrelevant, and, unlike things like woodworking, boutique manyfacturers can't really exist in this space
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I don’t really care to do any task traditionally associated with full fat computers directly on my phone, simply because the input methods are extremely poor for that kind of thing. If my phone could act like an ultrabook/netbook when hooked up to a screen and proper desktop input on the other hand (similar to DeX, iPadOS 26, and the forthcoming baseline Android desktop mode), that’s a more interesting proposition and probably one that a number of more typical users would find interesting too. For example, university students whose main use for a computer is editing documents could comfortably get by with nothing but a nice-ish phone, a monitor, and a Bluetooth KB+mouse.
  - Almondsetat 1y ago
    Google is said to be in the process of unifying Android and ChromeOs (which can run Linux programs), so your wishes are not that irrealistic (especially since DeX has been around for a while now)
    - chrisweekly 1y ago
      cool, good to know also, FYI (and for the sake of non-native English readers), it's "unrealistic". ["irrealistic" relates to irrealism, a literary technique that departs from reality]
  - _shantaram 1y ago
    this thing was so far ahead of its time https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-PadFone-Smartphone.83851.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-PadFone-Smartphone... if it came out today with say 16gb of RAM and used the new Android VM feature I would buy it instantly
butz 1y ago
It's finally time for Palm Pilot to shine again.
zahlman 1y ago
> time for us to go back I never left. Well, my flip phones have had cameras in them, but. On the other hand, "virtual credit card"? What?? And what good is proper "mobile storage and compute" if I don't at least have a laptop-sized screen and a proper physical input device?
rafram 1y ago
That wouldn’t sell. Who wants to buy two devices with more or less the same hardware when they could buy just one?
- rs186 1y ago
  This. Apple stopped selling all iPod hardware, including iPod touch, for a reason.
TheRealPomax 1y ago
Or, and hear me out this is going to sound crazy: we finally stop pretending that we're using phones. When was the last time anyone actually used their "mobile phone" for actual real phone calls to a phone number that wasn't "phone support because the company involved is so ancient or dark patterned that they only offer phone support"? Or voluntarily initiated sending a text message, rather than using email or messenger software? So how about we just stop making "mobile phones" and just sell what they are: pocket computers. And that name immediately tells legislators what's appropriate hardware control, namely: none. If you buy a pocket computer, you can now do with that computer whatever you want, and the company that makes the hardware has no say over that, and the company that makes the OS has no legal basis for locking you out of anything. And if those are the same company, then the EU can finally go "how about no, you get to break up or you will never sell anything in our market again".
- saulpw 1y ago
  > When was the last time anyone actually used their "mobile phone" for actual real phone calls I called my mom yesterday (to her landline), and then I sent a text message to my friend from a parking lot to let them know I'd be there soon.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  99% of my communications are SMS/MMS and while i do avoid phone calls my friend called me yesterday, and i called a business to ask about their holiday hours this weekend. And it's all LTE, your pocket computer needs a network whether you use SMS or some IP messenger. Therefore carriers get involved, and they make horrifying demands of users and manufacturers. But yeah, i don't want a phone, i want a pocket computer with VoLTE
superkuh 1y ago
Especially since the mobile phone part legally can never be owned or controlled by the human person. Only corporations can own and use the baseband computer/modem because only they have bought the spectrum license rights and built out the infrastructure to justify it to the FCC. Similar situations exist in other countries. This legal reality is showing itself more and more in the practicalities of actual using "smartphones". The only real solution is what op said, make the modem completely separate from the computing device.

mathiaspoint 1y ago

Modem Manager on Linux handles ppp and texting (even MMS if you're willing to build mmsd which isn't easy) with just a USB modem. You don't need a phone at all. All phones have these days is "the app ecosystem" which is designed and optimized just to rent you out to corporations. Exposing yourself to it is almost always a loss.

mbac32768 1y ago
Do you actually carry around a Linux laptop with a USB modem instead of a smartphone? Can you blog about it?
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  Yes I do. I don't really maintain a blog but I've been thinking about writing some articles on my personal site about how I have everything set up.

bapak 1y ago

The nerds are the minority. If you want hackable machines vote with your wallet and/or with your politicians.

pharrington 1y ago

Nope. Its time to have full ownership over our handheld computers.

garciasn 1y ago
There are options out there for you to do this. Hell, build your own. That’s what nerds did long ago. Keep up the same effort today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ori_b 1y ago
  There's a lot of effort going into making it impossible to interact with the rest of the world if you run your own code. Look up remote attestation.
  - garciasn 1y ago
    Linux changed the landscape of Unix. We can do it with phones too. The defeatist attitude, while potentially true, didn’t land us where we are today server side.
    - ori_b 1y ago
      A purely technical solution is insufficient. Put on your suit and prepare to play politics.
    - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
      Linux was a one-time anomaly in a much simpler, wilder era without overwhelmingly dominant incumbents in the spaces that Linux eventually took over.
    - saulpw 1y ago
      Linux was created in 1993, when the computing world was still understandable by a single human. This is no longer the case, hence why we haven't seen any new (hacker) operating systems since then.
- echelon 1y ago
  > There are options out there for you to do this. That's like the tiny moments of freedom that Winston Smith has in 1984 before he is captured and tortured. We live in a mobile computing dictatorship. There isn't time, money, or energy for millions of people to do this. And so we are taxed, corralled, and treated like cattle. Google and Apple own smartphones and nobody can do anything about it. The only solution is government dismantlement of the Google/Apple monopoly. That starts with mandates for web installs of native apps by default, without hidden settings menus or scare walls.

throwaway106382 1y ago

Here you go: https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/ https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/

dotancohen 1y ago
No CardDAV sync. How do you get contacts on and off the device?
- tokai 1y ago
  You use vCard. https://www.punkt.ch/repofiles/14440-MP02%20backing%20up%20contacts%20EN%20DE%20IT.pdf https://www.punkt.ch/repofiles/14440-MP02%20backing%20up%20c...
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    With over 900 contacts? Even just my personal CardDAV account has close to 200 contacts.
    - tokai 1y ago
      CardDAV is an extension of vCard. vCard can handle an arbitrary amount of contacts. But who knows, you definitely have more experience in using address book protocols than me.
      - dotancohen 1y ago
        I don't claim to know much. But with multiple contact lists and many groups in each list, CardDAV is a must.

dotancohen 1y ago

Find a dumb phone that: 1. Presents a mobile hotspot, and 2. Supports CardDAV so I can actually sync my contacts 3. Records calls There were none the last time I tried, about three years ago. And that even ignores the issue of trying to dial a number from a link on a web page or in a document.

baq 1y ago
> Presents a mobile hotspot I guess you can get a mobile hotspot and a dumb phone separately. Looks like 5G Wifi 6 APs are available for ~$100.
omnimus 1y ago
I am not 100% sure but my partner has the nokia “bannana” phone and i think it supports both. It for sure supports 4g hotspot and caldav but i think even carddav. Kinda sad that it's KaiOS the FirefoxOS fork. One can only wonder what would have happened if Mozilla kept with the project till now. There is huge wave of people wanting less absorbing devices nowdays.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
It’s so strange that out of the box CalDAV and CardDAV support is rare for mobile devices. iPhones are the best somehow, with Android being heavily Google-focused and support is totally absent on non-smart platforms, which is the perfect opposite of what one might expect! It’d make way more sense if the more open platforms were built around open standards, but somehow here we are.
- xethos 1y ago
  It's "rare" in that Apple, BlackBerry / RIM, and (seemingly, though I never used it) Windows Mobile all supported it. It was only ever Google that didn't The fact they now make up half the market is what makes it rare, not that other mobile OS' didn't make it available
numpad0 1y ago
There was a multiple years of gap between rollout of voice call specification on LTE(VoLTE) and launches of first featurephone operating system supporting it. Android and iOS were only implementation available for a while. For this reason, practically all "featurephone" style phones that supports voice call, except very few, runs AOSP. At the point where your product runs AOSP, you might as well launch it as a low end smartphone, which is what a lot of vendor do.

Almondsetat 1y ago

The ratio between nerds and "normal" consumers is pretty high, and being a nerd does not automatically mean you care about having a "mobile unix workstation" (what unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone?), and even if you have one it doesn't mean you'll actually find a use for it. It's safe to say that the market is irrelevant, and, unlike things like woodworking, boutique manyfacturers can't really exist in this space

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I don’t really care to do any task traditionally associated with full fat computers directly on my phone, simply because the input methods are extremely poor for that kind of thing. If my phone could act like an ultrabook/netbook when hooked up to a screen and proper desktop input on the other hand (similar to DeX, iPadOS 26, and the forthcoming baseline Android desktop mode), that’s a more interesting proposition and probably one that a number of more typical users would find interesting too. For example, university students whose main use for a computer is editing documents could comfortably get by with nothing but a nice-ish phone, a monitor, and a Bluetooth KB+mouse.
- Almondsetat 1y ago
  Google is said to be in the process of unifying Android and ChromeOs (which can run Linux programs), so your wishes are not that irrealistic (especially since DeX has been around for a while now)
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    cool, good to know also, FYI (and for the sake of non-native English readers), it's "unrealistic". ["irrealistic" relates to irrealism, a literary technique that departs from reality]
- _shantaram 1y ago
  this thing was so far ahead of its time https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-PadFone-Smartphone.83851.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-PadFone-Smartphone... if it came out today with say 16gb of RAM and used the new Android VM feature I would buy it instantly

butz 1y ago

It's finally time for Palm Pilot to shine again.

zahlman 1y ago

> time for us to go back I never left. Well, my flip phones have had cameras in them, but. On the other hand, "virtual credit card"? What?? And what good is proper "mobile storage and compute" if I don't at least have a laptop-sized screen and a proper physical input device?

rafram 1y ago

That wouldn’t sell. Who wants to buy two devices with more or less the same hardware when they could buy just one?

rs186 1y ago
This. Apple stopped selling all iPod hardware, including iPod touch, for a reason.

TheRealPomax 1y ago

Or, and hear me out this is going to sound crazy: we finally stop pretending that we're using phones. When was the last time anyone actually used their "mobile phone" for actual real phone calls to a phone number that wasn't "phone support because the company involved is so ancient or dark patterned that they only offer phone support"? Or voluntarily initiated sending a text message, rather than using email or messenger software? So how about we just stop making "mobile phones" and just sell what they are: pocket computers. And that name immediately tells legislators what's appropriate hardware control, namely: none. If you buy a pocket computer, you can now do with that computer whatever you want, and the company that makes the hardware has no say over that, and the company that makes the OS has no legal basis for locking you out of anything. And if those are the same company, then the EU can finally go "how about no, you get to break up or you will never sell anything in our market again".

saulpw 1y ago
> When was the last time anyone actually used their "mobile phone" for actual real phone calls I called my mom yesterday (to her landline), and then I sent a text message to my friend from a parking lot to let them know I'd be there soon.
queenkjuul 1y ago
99% of my communications are SMS/MMS and while i do avoid phone calls my friend called me yesterday, and i called a business to ask about their holiday hours this weekend. And it's all LTE, your pocket computer needs a network whether you use SMS or some IP messenger. Therefore carriers get involved, and they make horrifying demands of users and manufacturers. But yeah, i don't want a phone, i want a pocket computer with VoLTE

superkuh 1y ago

Especially since the mobile phone part legally can never be owned or controlled by the human person. Only corporations can own and use the baseband computer/modem because only they have bought the spectrum license rights and built out the infrastructure to justify it to the FCC. Similar situations exist in other countries. This legal reality is showing itself more and more in the practicalities of actual using "smartphones". The only real solution is what op said, make the modem completely separate from the computing device.