Are smartphones any good? (was Re: Oneplus One support)

[Spacefalcon the Outlaw]

Allan Mwenda <allanitomwesh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Could you get a simple game on there like tower of hanoi? That would rock.

Because I do not expect to make any money on this project and am doing
it primarily for my own personal use instead, I do not plan on
implementing any UI firmware features other than those I need for my
own use, and games aren't among the latter.

However, the *complete C source code* for the entire firmware, both
the UI and the radio protocol layers, will be freely published, so if
you want some game or whatever, you can implement it yourself, or hire
any C programmer of your choice to implement it for you.

When you buy a PC or a laptop, do you insist that the hardware
manufacturer ship it to you with some particular game or whatever
installed, or else you won't buy?  I expect not, as that would be
rather silly - you can just sudo apt-get install whatever you like.

It should be the same with phones, including dumbphones.  I realize
that most people currently cannot fathom the idea of modifying the
UI/UX (user experience) firmware on their dumbphones to their own
liking, and are similarly incapable of distinguishing between hardware
and firmware features - that's because up until now *no one* has made
a dumbphone with free firmware.  But that situation is about to
change.

> And Dual SIM too,

How important is this feature to you?  Is it more important than
freedom?  Is it more important to you than having the radio firmware
in full source code form?

At the present time the only GSM baseband chipsets for which We the
People possess the radio firmware source code are TI Calypso and TI
LoCosto.  I am currently building a reusable modem module based on the
former; I will then use this module to build my Free Dumb Phone, but
anyone else is also welcome to take my free GSM modem module and use
it in their free smartphone design.  However, these TI chipsets are
absolutely incapable, in hardware terms, of supporting more than one
SIM socket.

All those dual SIM phones use MTK or Spreadtrum chips instead.  There
are some MTK semi-sources floating around, see:

ftp://ftp.ifctf.org/pub/GSM/MTK/

However, code for the GSM radio protocols and many other interesting
things is in the form of object blobs, not actual source.  Thus the
older, non-dual-SIM-capable TI chipsets are the only ones for which we
have the full source for everything.

So given a choice between a single SIM phone with fully free firmware
and a dual SIM phone whose fw is at least partially closed and
proprietary (because fully free fw is not currently possible on the
dual-SIM-capable chipsets), which would you choose?

For my own personal use I want a dumbphone with the TI Calypso chipset
running fully liberated firmware.  Hence the phone I'm building will
only have one SIM socket.

> Unless you are doing something illegal what does it matter if the
> telecom company read your texts to your girlfriend?

I certainly do wish for an end-to-end encrypted mode of communication,
both voice and text.  This functionality can be implemented over
mobile-to-mobile transparent CSD (circuit switched data) calls, which
work just fine in my part of the world, and I estimate that it will
probably be possible to implement this functionality on a Calypso
dumbphone.  However, I won't even start seriously looking into it
until *after* I have built a basic Free Dumb Phone.

> I think this dumbphone will be awesome.

It will certainly be awesome *for me*, but considering that every
person with whom I have conversed on this subject wants (or seems to
want) something very different from what I'm building, I really don't
know if anyone other than me would want to use the phone which I will
actually produce.

But that's OK: I am building this Free Dumb Phone for my own personal
use, not to please anyone else.  It is simply not possible to please
everyone, and my own needs come first - it's called scratching a
personal itch, the primary motivating factor for all FOSS development.

SF