Carrier-locked phones

Repairable and upgradeable

True, and itā€™s powered by Android, which makes it a bit more friendly to those of us who care about FOSS :slight_smile:

More generally speaking we are at the sunset of the system, whatever it was, I never really understood it, which sustained itself artificially in the last 20-30 years with anti-natural and anti-economic policies to the detriment of many and in favor of a the narrow circle that was at the top of this system, now everything has become no longer sustainable, this act of monopolistic distortions, total surveillance, censorship, the violation of the basic laws of democracy, the organized media pandemic, are all symptoms of the terminus of an anti-entropic system that can no longer go on as it was conceived.
We are in a rough sea in the midst of a storm, and as such, you have to hold on tight to avoid jolting away when the strong waves arrive.

To add to the problems in the US, there is also the lack of standardization. You may have heard of them using a weird obsolete unit system with inches and pounds and the like. But it doesnā€™t stop there. It is the only country where some mobile phone operators do not use the worldwide GSM standard and do their own thing: What are Phone Bands (GSM, CDMA) and Why Do They Matter? | Verizon Wireless

This results in some phones having a version with a different modem just for these operators. Nowadays it results in modems compatible with both standards, increasing costs and complexity (which means probably a bit reduced battery life) for everyone.

Fortunately they finally shut down this nonstandard network last year and switched to a standard 4G/LTE and 5G network.

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The main selling point of ā€œpowered by an open source systemā€ for me is beeing able to get the code, change it, recompile and use it.

I tried this for android with a dedicated build slave and i could never get it to work because of their insane requirements for the build (disk space alone isā€¦ like 150GB or something)

That to me makes it more ā€œsource availableā€ than open source, i may be nitpicking here, but then again android doesnā€™t really have an open doors development process either.

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Sounds great.

True, perhaps I shouldā€™ve thought about my wording a bit moreā€¦ :stuck_out_tongue: :slight_smile:

Though the sticking point for me is the fact that I donā€™t know enough of any programming language to make changes to source code of anything, LOLā€¦ but I digress.

Also, one more admittedly off-topic comment: @amonpaike, you clearly have a very varied vocabulary, I commend you :slight_smile:

I think that Japan also has (or had) a non-standard system.

Iā€™m not bothered by the non standard system. I lok at it as innovative space.

The biggest problem i see is regulatory capture building anticompetitive artificial monopolys at the legislative and executive ends of government.

It is well past the time to deal with the massive beauracratic administrative shadow government that many of our western Republican style governments have let grow like weeds.

Systems older than 3G are already stopped. 3G is planned to be stopped in 2024.

This is not true, or not completely true, or at least not globally true. In the EU 2G will stay available yet for a considerable amount of time because the legacy systems (which doesnā€™t means phones, but POS systems, etc. But every 3G capable phone can and should be able to fallback to 2G, if necessary. Therefore they will continue to work, but many telco presents this as ā€žthe end of the worldā€œ to motivate users to change devices.
For example in .hu you can access the state (eg. Tax money) financed ā€žnew deviceā€œ program, where the government covers ~70 EUR of your new device.
Great chance to make some millions if you happen to be a politician and/or a phone importer or a telco.
In other regions they force the users to leave legacy tech behind and switch directly to VoLTE. But thats a different story.
I keep rolling with my alien technologies, i think. Blackberries for president.

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I was telling about Japan.

as far as I know, even in Italy they stopped 3G

Here in Germany,they already shut down 3G but 2G is still available and is here to stay.
Thatā€™s unfortunate for people with 3G phones who do now have much slower internet but at least it still works as they can fall back to 2Gā€¦

Yes, you are right, Vodafone already stopped 3g last year, and Tim will follow next year, I donā€™t know the current plan of the other major Italian telco Wind/H3g, 2g is still on so if you have a old phone and no need of internet connection you can still make and receive calls, but having probably the lowest cost in western Europe for mobile connections it makes no sense to stay off the grid, there a lot of cheap 4g phones out there

Iā€™m in the southern region of the US (Alabama to be precise), Iā€™m going to assume Iā€™ll be the sore thumb in this conversation, but who in the hell needs a 2G/3G phone or device anymore? 4G has been around for a good amount of time and is blazingly faster, unless youā€™re in a poorer area or a developing market 4G should be readily available and 2G/3G should already be things of the past.

Why throw good phones away just because newer ones exist?

Incidentally my Haiku Laptop has a WWAN card, I sure hope I can make that work instead of discovering that it is now e-junk because the network was disabled.

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2G is here to stay (or at least for a decade or two) in many countries because a lot of industrial infrastructure is using 2G. It also still has more complete coverage than 3G/4G in many cases.

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Yes, thatā€™s the main thing. The mobile phone network isnā€™t only about phones, itā€™s used for a lot of other things that update at a much slower rate.

Iā€™m sure there is some hardware somewhere that is remote controlled by sound tones from a modem sent over a 2G voice call, after having been forced to stop using a landline phone because that technology doesnā€™t exist anymore.

There are emergency phones in elevators, probably the same thing is done there.

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