[Replicant] GTA04 boards and complete devices ready for ordering

Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli GNUtoo at no-log.org
Sat Nov 28 22:46:56 UTC 2015


On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 19:38:31 +0100
"H. Nikolaus Schaller" <hns at goldelico.com> wrote:

> It is a "moving deadline". Each time someone else orders one it will
> come closer.
> 
> In other words we can't fix it on any time scale. We will build them
> in the next weeks and depending on the production yield and
> repairability of potentially faulty boards we will have some stock
> until it is sold.
The decision is hard to make on my side:

Given how unstable is my current situation, the price is very high.
(Price are always subjective)

I've a GTA04 A3 (Unfortunately I broke the external GPS antenna
connector, long story),
so if I wish to work on it, I technically can.
However the A3 is rather the "demo" version for me, since I can't power
off the modem on the A3. This was of course fixed on later versions.

Beside potential privacy issues, this is an issue for battery life (in
years, not in hours) because at some point the battery will discharge
enough not to be able to power the phone anymore, if I use it for
something else than development. That would then prevent me from
developing for it.

Right now I'm not in a state where I can commit to work on the GTA04
support either. And I'm not even sure that I would be the right person
to do such work since Paul (Kocialkowski) is more skilled with
userspace than me.

The last work I did with this phone is trying to make sure that it is
supported by Parabola (a 100% free software GNU/Linux distribution).

So I could wait for the neo900.
While I really think keyboards are important, then I've a dilemma again:
I personally don't like how the GPS is handled on the neo900:

As I understand it the neo900 GPS is part of the modem, with hardware
ways(under control of the main CPU) to find if it was misused.
The hardware detection can also be used with the 3G modem in general.
So if that modem is sometimes misused (by the network for instance),
then it makes sense to warn the user and act upon that.
Instead, if it is always misused (can it be at large scale?), then a
separate GPS makes sense, like in the case of the GTA04.
I get that GPS used to consume a lot of power because they had to
calculate the fix based on the GPS satellite signals, but I guess there
are some shortcuts to that, with the assistance of the network.

Note that the way I remember the neo900 hardware might be inaccurate,
so correct me if I'm wrong.

Denis.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/replicant/attachments/20151128/d7c98bc6/attachment.asc>


More information about the Replicant mailing list