15 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] thread
> Micro-USB (USB 2.0)

I love the idea of the phone but having micro-usb instead of usb type-c is IMO a substantial caveat. I do love the idea of a 'dumbed' down smartphone with a large battery capacity though...

EDIT Can it be true that the base model gets Bluetooth 5.0 but the range topping model C21 Plus only gets 4.2? Can someone enlighten my on the reasons for this?

I recently bought a $20 Firefox OS phone from CVS. It's one of the best phones I've ever owned: removable battery, hardware keyboard, absolutely no bloatware or spyware, fast and responsive UI, apps are all very tiny. There are options besides Android and iOS and you don't have to go full Pinephone either.
Wait, hardware keyboard!? Pray tell the model number of this marvel.
Pretty sure it's a KaiOS phone, which comes from Firefox OS.
I think they mean a keypad. The KaiOS phones sold in the US don't have real qwerty keyboards, at least not that I've seen.
I've been rocking a Nokia 7.2 for a few years. I bought it purely because it runs stock Android without bloatware (unlike my previous phone, aSamsung S8).

It's been pretty solid with good battery life and regular updates/upgrades, however it's not without trade offs:

* One update broke GPS. There was a workaround made available.

* The latest update broke the front-facing camera with no workaround, no ETA on a fix. Video calls now require standing in front of a mirror.

At least I have the option of downgrading if the camera issue becomes more than a minor annoyance or isn't fixed soon.

Overall, I'd recommend Nokia as an affordable Android device without all the bloatware of the major players.

I like to use my phones for long periods.

Switching phones is a total annoyance for me.

And, through a decade of smartphone use, I think it is more about replaceable battery more than anything.

It seems that companies brought out sealed handsets for the sole purpose of selling more units. I really despise that.

I will buy this whenever I can get my hands on it. And I will use it for 5 years.

I personally can't imagine ever going back to not using my phone in the shower.

Sony perfected the water proof phone with the open headphone jack years ago so I always felt the push to get rid of the headphone jack was fake, but I don't know of any high end phones that were waterproof and had a removable battery.

Samsung's Galaxy S5, their 2014 flagship, was IP67 water resistant and had a removable battery.
You really can't disconnect to be able to take a shower?
(comment deleted)
> Unisoc SC9863a

Interesting. There seems to be some upstream Linux support for this submitted to the mailing list by Unisoc engineers.

I'm not very knowledgeable in this area so I'd love to have some info from people w ho are, but is there any decent chance this could be end up being a fully upstream ARM Linux phone? I'd love to have such a device.

Can it even be boot-unlocked? AIUI, this was a big issue with previous Nokia Android devices.
"Go phone?" I was at AT&T (later AT&T Wireless) when they were talking about their own "Go Phone." My R&D group got wrangled in on this. I brought up that the Banzai Institute had a cellular device called "Go-Phone" used in the early-/mid- 1980's and that we should check if we can use the name though the Institute came up with it...

I played it with a serious face, reality is that it's from a novel by Earl Mac Rauch. I still chuckle when I hear [read] the name.

As a rabble-rouser/tester-of-belief-systems and gullibility, I still act like the Banzai Institute is real.

Edit: p. 14 of "Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai."

> No plans for OS upgrades, just quarterly security updates for the next 2 years.

Meh. So it basically gets downgraded to fancy mp3 player after 2 years. Imagine people buying it a year from release, then throwing it away a year later.