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by moyta 3506 days ago
The N900 is an interesting piece of hardware, perhaps a phone based on an Allwinner chipset with a fully separate baseband processor would be the way to go for an N900 replacement?

I guess the major impediments I see are getting an LTE baseband at a decent price point, and providing Signal Private Messenger and other apps that you can get on iOS & Android, as we have seen, developers won't go for a 3rd development target (Windows Phone).
1 comments
cheiVia0 3506 days ago
https://neo900.org/
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Gruselbauer 3506 days ago
That might be the first hardware crowdfunding I ever buy into. I've got a seething rage at just about every aspect of current phones and a huge nostalgia for Nokia's early smartphones.

Physical keyboard? Yay. Messages in natural language are one thing, ssh'ing into a machine or writing code is an entirely different topic.

Open systems thrive with exactly the kind of software I use almost exclusively. I can live without any mobile games - srsly, get a handheld or build one yourself[1] - and I don't use many other services I couldn't find alternatives for.

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qwertyuiop924 3506 days ago
You're dead right on the games front. You can get a GBA for ~$20-$40, and have 100s of games that are a hell of a lot better than most of what sees release on mobile.
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cheiVia0 3506 days ago
Related project:

https://pyra-handheld.com/

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tluyben2 3505 days ago
I pre-ordered as I am a very happy OpenPandora owner. It's a full Linux (especially now that I have Debian on it) and I can VNC or SSH with tablets and phones to it. When closed it consumes very little battery, it has tons of games and I can do full dev on it. The only annoying thing for me is an ARM thing; GHCi still doesn't seem to work on ARM, but that's a minor annoyance and last I check it is close to getting there.

Edit: to be honest; the Pyra is almost perfect for me (when using it with a $30 Android tablet as monitor it is very close). Currently my perfect all day computer would be a 10 inch tablet running (native) Linux with a stand, 3g and 15+ hrs battery life. I really like the MS foldable mobile keyboard but the only Linux ready stuff are full laptops or chromebooks. The chromebooks have no 3g unfortunately.

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snvzz 3506 days ago
Mandatory warning: PowerVR.
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cheiVia0 3506 days ago
ImgTec are still trying to hire someone to work on open source powervr drivers:

https://careers.imgtec.com/cw/en/job/495752/linux-graphics-d...

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