I often ditch my phone and carry my hotspot device for my internet. The only drawback is that for viewing my texts and OTPs i end up putting the sim in my phone or opening up the web interface on my laptop. This seems to work very well as a dumbphone per se.
If you move to an Apple set up, the phone can act as a hotspot and there is no need to take out your sim. Also... you have a physical sim card? I thought those became obsolete.
Physical sims are as obsolete as 3.5mm headphones. They both continue to work and have different tradeoffs than 'modern' alternatives and you have a different selection of devices to work with.
I did some funny software porting on one of those dongles. At one point, I had it connected to a battery pack for power, joined onto my home WiFi for LAN/WAN access... and had the stick running the Open5GS cellular core stack, allowing my CBRS LTE base station to serve users on an in-home private LTE network by connecting to the cellstick over WiFi for management. (No, the stick's own cellular modem wasn't being used here at all. Just scavenged compute for the tiniest LTE core!)
Postmarketos works well on those and they have lots of info and links. [1]
My biggest tip is to carefully back up every partition of the original firmware - there are many many seemingly identical variants and if you hose your particular baseband components you will lose your cellular functionality.
Based on the work the person has done, if they wanted to make something with an exceedingly long battery life, and the battery setup there already seems to be basically a 1S li ion, they could graft in a back side battery holder for two high quality 18650 cells in parallel. It would probably last weeks.
The neat thing about 18650s though is that you can put a battery door on it and make them swappable, if a person used a holder that can accommodate button top protected 18650 cells. The same cells can also be shared by a bunch of good quality flashlights and headlamps. I have several extremely useful headlamps from "sofirn" that take my choice of cell and have a built in USB-C charging port and charge circuitry protected behing a gasket and twist-open ip67 sealed cap. The pouch battery would be better as an integrated all in one product but also makes the thing a bit less modular.
There are advantages in some applications, it’s just not a one size fits all tool. Slim devices aren’t really a good fit for them. They make sense in round devices (like a flashlight) or larger devices where space isn’t as much of a concern.
No fighting intended, I think it's interesting to see that there's many ways of doings things, and doing a sort of mental whiteboard exercise on what the benefits and drawbacks of different things are... Like, using cylindrical cells would let me share cells with my head lamp, swap cells, independently charge cells and keep spare charged cells ready.
While using a pouch cell keeps the profile much more slim, portable, still has opportunities for really high capacity in watt hours, and allows for a more robust case design that doesn't have the structural weakness of a battery door.
And if you put the pouch cell on a set of wires with a small pluggable connector to the main PCB (and a case that can screw open/shut) it's still an item the user can replace with 5 minutes and a screwdriver if it wears out from many cycles over a period of years.
> And if you put the pouch cell on a set of wires with a small pluggable connector to the main PCB (and a case that can screw open/shut) it's still an item the user can replace with 5 minutes and a screwdriver if it wears out from many cycles over a period of years.
True, and you could even enclose it in a quick swap hard shell case with contacts, like the old Nokia cell phone batteries. (Those are actually still good for some uses, I have a gadget that uses them.)
We’re fortunate to live in an era of battery abundance.
It would be pretty cool to put Hermes Agent or some agent system on that thing, assuming the OpenStick build has enough RAM/storage. That would be fire.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 8.3 ms ] thread[1]: like this: https://img.joomcdn.net/ea91b4418997d83d802339fad0bbcf878b9d...
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Aside, but it appears some MSM8916-based dongles run Android UI despite having no display: https://github.com/u0d7i/uz801#screenshots
So... so cursed.
My biggest tip is to carefully back up every partition of the original firmware - there are many many seemingly identical variants and if you hose your particular baseband components you will lose your cellular functionality.
[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...
While using a pouch cell keeps the profile much more slim, portable, still has opportunities for really high capacity in watt hours, and allows for a more robust case design that doesn't have the structural weakness of a battery door.
And if you put the pouch cell on a set of wires with a small pluggable connector to the main PCB (and a case that can screw open/shut) it's still an item the user can replace with 5 minutes and a screwdriver if it wears out from many cycles over a period of years.
True, and you could even enclose it in a quick swap hard shell case with contacts, like the old Nokia cell phone batteries. (Those are actually still good for some uses, I have a gadget that uses them.)
We’re fortunate to live in an era of battery abundance.
It's got less than 512GB of RAM, no package manager, and virtually no storage.