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Smartphone users are usually torn between the two choice — Android or iOS. Their dominance is such that other competing OS like Windows, BlackBerry OS, or Symbian have almost been abandoned.Those who don't want either of them can opt for Pine64's Linux phone dubbed the PinePhone which offers good hardware and software at an affordable rate of $149.
The phone's specs aren't great, but it does include a headphone jack (I wonder if it's capable of using the JACK audio system?) and the article notes that it may provide physical switches for disabling various components. The company behind it, Pine64, also produce the PineBook Linux laptop, which also use an ARM processor.
Source: https://fossbytes.com/pinephone-linux-smartphone-149/
Related: Kickstarter: Pine A64, Cheaper and More Powerful than Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @10:52PM (5 children)
Not at all. you can buy decent Chinese phones all day long for ~200 so 150 and cut the margin a bit, more than doable.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 02 2019, @04:23AM (3 children)
I will not buy this. I do not buy Chink shit, nor will I buy anything else.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @08:53AM (2 children)
Enjoy getting your privacy ass-raped by jews.
Even if you don't have a fagdroid or a goyphone, everyone around you does, and these things are always listening. Either move to a cabin in the woods or plug in to the botnet along with everybody else.
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:22PM
The Kaczynski Dilemma
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @05:36AM
so our choices are
1. privacy ass-raped by jews (which phone or whatever do they have?)
2. privacy ass-raped by microsoft (american? or can we now say that they are indian?)
3. privacy ass-raped by chinese (huawie)
4. privacy ass-raped by samsung (can we call this Korean? )
5. privacy ass-raped by google (they seem to be panracial with a lean towards panethnicity heading towards indian dominated)
what is common here is that it does not matter who is doing it
you are doing to be violated any which way you go
it is like voting with two evil candidates? choose the lesser evil?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:49PM
You can get a LeEco Le 2 [lineageos.org] for $100 over at aliexpress if you're going to run LineageOS anyhow. It's $150-200 worth of hardware (Qualcomm SoC, good screen, good battery, fingerprint scanner, decent camera, QC3 over TypeC so no headphone jack though...) compared to everything else around but the company doesn't support their cellular products anymore (they cut back the entire division to focus on smart TVs a couple of years ago). it's a clearance sale prince in a sense so they're not making a whole lot of profits off of it. But don't kid yourself. They're still in the green selling them.
So, yeah. It's entirely possible to make a cheap good phone. Free open software is the problem since the graphics and baseband are typically blobed. The baseband ends up bootstarted along or before the compute processors with a blob on it's own processor that linux talks with over a TTY and an analog(?) mic lane. The graphics are shimmed around a kernel module. There supposed to be basebands out there that don't require blobs. And by that we're not saying you get to know what they're running. Rather, that the default ROM they ship with has been in the market long enough for the manufacturer to update to a relatively bug free state. The graphics will never be truly free over the shit ton of IP and trade secret violation going on in the industry. So your only hope is the reversed graphics stack... And while those are making progress, they're mostly limited to older hardware.