I’ve been searching for a smartphone alternative in Canada. Not a literal dumb phone but jist something that would help reduce how many ads I view and data I generate for giant tech companies.
I would just want to use spotify, be able to look up directions (i dont mind pulling over and looking at a static map), text and call.
It seems like uconsole could fit that niche, in a sense. What would be the possibilities, strengths and weaknesses that can be predicted at this point?
Found that the oem of the lte module lists “IC” industry canada
Good enough
Pretty terrible as this is not a phone. AFAIK the uconsole doe not sleep in the same way a smart phone does so you cannot simply tap the power button and have it go to sleep and instantly resume wen you need it next. You wold need to boot it up every time which will get old really fast.
Why not instead look at the smart phones that are specifically designed to avoid tracking? Combine that with the right combination of software and you can take advantage of what is effectively a solved problem, but with none of the negatives you dislike. The Uconsole is much less portable, much heavier, most likely less durable, less screen estate, and not designed to be primarily a communication device.
Could you do it? Absolutely. Would you regret it? Maybe not, hard for me to say.
Only 1 way to find out. Interesting about no sleep or low power mode. Debian with no GUI probably boots to shell pretty fast. Maybe I could write myself some interesting command line applications. Or add an rp2040 into the case somehow for low power stuff.
I also want to do this, how have things gone with you
I am fine with its heft, just only problem would be lack of sleep
It reminds me of gemini PDA or a pine phone with the keyboard extension, the former was a complete flop because of bad software and the latter is not as hackable as I’d like it to be
The R-01 module (only tested in DevTerm, no uConsole avail. yet here) has a very low power consumption, I had the DevTerm (mostly idling) for about 9-11 hours on battery (and it stayed very cool). Maybe that’s enough autonomy for some people.
I do have the R-01 in the uConsole. There are several issues needing work before I would suggest it for anyone that doesn’t know a bit about Linux. It is very slow. No problem, I like the command prompt anyway I thought. Booting into non-graphical mode, there isn’t a cursor. The “setterm cursor on” had no effect. Just try to run an editor like nano that way. Running “TWM” window manager, the terminal runs as expected with cursor and that is usable. Bluetooth isn’t working yet so you can’t use an external BT keyboard/mouse. I did flag these issues on the Git page, but i have too much to do and it is a bit out of my area of specialty for me to fix at this point.
I’m pretty sure all those issues you mentioned with the R01 also apply to the Devterm and have been mentioned in the forum (likely, many months ago). I know the cursor issue was mentioned before and i think the lack of Bluetooth was as well. And none of the cores support sleep mode on the Devterm either.
Part of the reason I only ordered the wifi version of the uConsole was because I couldn’t really see it being used as a solo “phone” device without a lot of work done by the community. Hopefully that will happen though!