Samsung Upcycle Promise

I guarantee you that, given your requirements, this will never be a product that you can buy.

Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.

Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.

The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.

Whenever someone tries to build a phone that even tries to tick those boxes y'all just find new excuses to not actually pay for it.

You should check the phones from Unihertz, “the worlds smallest smartphone”

there are websites made for you with millions of parameters to find the phone you need. not amazon or ebay

The motorola razr flip phones are great in my opinion.

Have you looked at Motorola? I'm not sure they have all of those features, but me and you think similarly and when I did research, I ended up choosing their $130 phone for my contractors.

But I main the $900 pixel.

They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.

Most 2012 era used phones will work here. Pick one off eBay.

Meanwhile Pixel doesn't require me to fill out any forms or contact anyone which is why I only use those at this point. IIRC in at least some cases the initial flip of the toggle requires internet access but that doesn't really bother me.

If the process requires anything beyond "internet access" I'm not purchasing the device.

Is this country-specific? I've owned plenty of OnePlus devices over the years and the have all being unlockable without any issues, or without having to ask anything from anyone.

The Librem 5 would be eliminated by the additional requirements of:

> "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive"

> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"

Adding my own experience: the battery life is also atrocious[0] and simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.

[0] Sitting on a shelf, with the screen off, not connected to cellular networks, not being used at all except to check the battery % periodically throughout the day: I got ~11 hours of battery life. My pixel 10 has been operating under the same conditions for 4 days and is still at 71% battery life (I'm intentionally draining it down to ~50% for long term storage while I wait for the bootloader to unlock in 2 years).

[1] The phone had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for years. No software had been installed, no accounts had been set up, it had never actually been used as a phone. Could not get more "stock" than that.

And Fairphone!

I'd argue that banks DO need to know that you've unlocked your bootloader, but they should present you with a "Your phone bootloader is unlocked. If you don't know what it means or you didn't do it yourself, exit the app now and contact customer support."

The problem is that app makers are lazy.

It's always a hit or miss with Motorola, but this should up your chances:

https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...

I think expecting software licenses to enforce your rights outside of the realm of software is a pretty bad take. I think Linus's take is quite solid: "I give you my source code, you give me your changes back, and we're even". There are a lot of us who don't think that FOSS should be weaponized as a poison pill to enact the authors worldview on topics outside of the realm of software alone.

If it should be a consumer right, why limit it only to devices certain types of software? Why not consumer protection law that applies to all devices? I think software licenses are the wrong tool for this problem.

There's a lot of crazy crayon licenses out there that try to fix the whole world by tacking on a whole lot of restrictions to their software licenses, prohibiting use for a long list of reasons... to me it sounds like a bunch of newspeak, as if "more restrictions = more freedom"

It’s not Linus Torvalds’ duty to make bootloader unlocking a reality.

For everyone? I mean it doesn’t seem to apply to Apple, need it apply to Google or Samsung?

samsung phones can be plugged into an external display and used like a computer right?

And more bad PR. I am not sure it was worth it.

If you want to live in a binary world. Meanwhile for the rest of us "not good" isn't the same as "bad."

> Welcome to capitalism?

Well, judging from the tone of your comment, you said this without a hint of irony or larger awareness, as if just chucking things in a hole, environment and everything be damned, was just sort of inevitable.

> It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.

Huh? Saving consumers money by reusing and repurposing perfectly good devices, save energy use, raw materials, distribution, and waste disposal and recycling of perfectly good devices. Those things save the economy and consumers money overall!

We get this not because of capitalism but because of growthism. We get this because big corporations gotta keep generating that profit, regardless of whether they have solved a problem or not. Gotta grow that market, gotta jack that stock.

You wrote that like there is no other way. Yes there is. For example I would not consider a job that would consist of writing a malware But I have conscience and doing something like that would make me uncomfortable. Even when I think about myself as more capitalist than socialist.

Same thing with Verizon wireless, who dominated the US cell phone market. Openly hostile "customer service".

I can't really think of a tech company that does not hate its users. Yes of course there's Framework, but I mean large tech companies. It's all glued shut, proprietary, planned obsolescence, AI slop-ified, privacy invasive and over priced. Feel free to add to the list.

Related anecdote: My old washing machine is about to die, and I was discussing this with a co-worker the other day. He told me, with much excitement, about his new washing machine with AI, and a smartphone app where he can program his own washing cycles. I... just don't feel like I belong on the same planet as this person. It's the polar opposite of what I want.

There's an app called Termux that comes with distro sources compiled for the Android/Linux. They're not binary compatible with regular GNU/Linux, but runs most software through distro standard ways.

Modern phones pack a good bit of compute, and can run things like VLAs decently well.

Of course, that would require today's phones to age out of "being used as a phone" bracket, and robotics VLAs to become actually useful. But things like the Comma AI autopilot hardware use slightly obsolete smartphone chips internally - so it's not like it's impossible to run a useful AI on this kind of HW.