<story><title>The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone</title><url>https://jleightcap.srht.site/blog/openphone.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zwieback</author><text>I like the idea of a more open phone a lot but dispute the &amp;quot;Smartphones are shit&amp;quot; premise. I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago. The problem is that we don&amp;#x27;t want to pay what it really costs to have such a great system so we sell our souls and then endlessly gripe about it.&lt;p&gt;Pinephone et al appeal to nerds and are a good reference case about those tradeoffs but I&amp;#x27;m doubtful they&amp;#x27;ll tip the scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usrn</author><text>As someone who had a few pre-smartphone PDAs: Smartphones absolutely are high powered shit. On paper they&amp;#x27;re amazing but the ecosystem limits you to scrolling instagram and only a handfull of accepted IMs (iOS struggles with XMPP and IRC for example, something even my hacked DS could do fine with 4MB of ram and a 60Mhz ARM9.)&lt;p&gt;Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn&amp;#x27;t a mac) is a real bitch. &lt;i&gt;Especially&lt;/i&gt; if you don&amp;#x27;t have an internet connection. It&amp;#x27;s almost as bad as a ti84+ honestly, just a nicer screen, a couple cameras, and the ability to send IM and email. In fact the TI84 could do things iOS can&amp;#x27;t, I had compilers on mine.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Somehow I missed that you mentioned the battery. Smartphones have some of the worst battery life among any PDA I&amp;#x27;ve had. iPhones can stretch out a few days (&lt;i&gt;maybe&lt;/i&gt; a week if it&amp;#x27;s just sitting in a drawer near a tower) if you use them sparingly but it&amp;#x27;s nothing like the Palm Pilot or the grayscale calculators that could easily last a month.</text></comment>
<story><title>The case for LineageOS and the PinePhone</title><url>https://jleightcap.srht.site/blog/openphone.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zwieback</author><text>I like the idea of a more open phone a lot but dispute the &amp;quot;Smartphones are shit&amp;quot; premise. I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago. The problem is that we don&amp;#x27;t want to pay what it really costs to have such a great system so we sell our souls and then endlessly gripe about it.&lt;p&gt;Pinephone et al appeal to nerds and are a good reference case about those tradeoffs but I&amp;#x27;m doubtful they&amp;#x27;ll tip the scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>&amp;gt; I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago.&lt;p&gt;From my quotes file: &amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s amazing what we can build, it&amp;#x27;s baffling what we have built.&amp;quot; (jrumbut, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=25168187&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=25168187&lt;/a&gt;) Yes, the hardware is amazing, and the software is sometimes amazing in what it can do, but... If you have gobs of bandwidth (courtesy of modern WiFi and LTE) and loads of RAM and storage and CPUs that &lt;i&gt;scream&lt;/i&gt; (seriously, for a while my phone had more cores than most of my laptops at a close clock speed) and a high-quality touch-sensitive screen and a solid OS that makes it easy to use the system even on that tiny screen, but you use it to let apps bloat like there&amp;#x27;s no tomorrow (Facebook comes to mind), show ads even more efficiently, spy on the user at will, and deliberately make things worse so people will pay more (ex. YouTube), what have you really gained?</text></comment>