“Freedom Phone” is an overpriced smartphone that doesn’t free you from anything(xda-developers.com)
xda-developers.com
“Freedom Phone” is an overpriced smartphone that doesn’t free you from anything
https://www.xda-developers.com/freedom-phone-overpriced-smartphone/
20 comments
There are phones that actually can give you software freedom. The Pinephone and Librem 5 can both run mainline Linux with very few blobs.
Came here to say this. I'm using a Pinephone as my daily and although it's still very early it does nearly everything it needs to.
Just don't count on it to wake you up, the alarm clock doesn't always wake the phone on Manjaro+Phosh.
Just don't count on it to wake you up, the alarm clock doesn't always wake the phone on Manjaro+Phosh.
Only about 5 hours of freedom on a full charge though sadly.
I needed a "battery case" for my iPhone 8 very shortly after I got it and so did my wife.
She just upgraded to an iPhone 12 so we'll see how much time goes by before she needs one again too. Luckily Apple is making one now, so hopefully it will work better than the third party ones with respect to using the lightning port pass-through, which sometimes fails.
If needing more battery time were the only thing stopping me, I'd be on a PinePhone today.
She just upgraded to an iPhone 12 so we'll see how much time goes by before she needs one again too. Luckily Apple is making one now, so hopefully it will work better than the third party ones with respect to using the lightning port pass-through, which sometimes fails.
If needing more battery time were the only thing stopping me, I'd be on a PinePhone today.
5 hours idle or 5 hours of active use?
My pinephone manages about two days in standby
Screen use!
So basically it's existing hardware/software doused in snake oil and sold at a $350 upcharge?
A terrible product, if this review is accurate. But you have to at least admire their boldness in trying to blatantly manipulate a very opinionated and possibly underserved market.
A terrible product, if this review is accurate. But you have to at least admire their boldness in trying to blatantly manipulate a very opinionated and possibly underserved market.
This market isn't under-served at all. There are people tripping over each other to sell them investments in gold, reverse mortgages, commemorative Trump coins, shelf-stable buckets of food, really anything that you can put a sky-is-falling spin on gets thrown at this particular wall. Pick out a random conservative influencer/media person and scan their tweets for "discount code" like language, they sell lots of funny stuff to their fans.
If people are really willing to pay for crappy phones that come installed with political apps and news feeds meant to flatter their ego instead of providing any actual news, I'd say commemorative coins and etc are only scratching the surface of what you could potentially market to them.
People paying money for a physical echo chamber could probably as financially beneficial as politically beneficial, since you now have a platform with lots of access to a decently-sized market with known interests and easy keywords that'll trick them into overpaying.
People paying money for a physical echo chamber could probably as financially beneficial as politically beneficial, since you now have a platform with lots of access to a decently-sized market with known interests and easy keywords that'll trick them into overpaying.
> it features an “uncensorable app store”
If this is true, it will be a malicious actors paradise.
Freedom Calculator 2021: No allow Uncle Sam see you finance number. Use Freedom Calculator. No spywares or virus! Install now!
If this is true, it will be a malicious actors paradise.
Freedom Calculator 2021: No allow Uncle Sam see you finance number. Use Freedom Calculator. No spywares or virus! Install now!
Yeah, that's an absolute joke. They'll either put massive qualifications on "uncensorable" right out of the gate or pretty quickly have their hand forced by court orders or PR disasters. I wouldn't even be shocked if they wind up badgered into it by their own users (how likely is it that a few dedicated developers decide to publish a whole lot of atheist, socialist, and LGBT advocacy apps?).
I've owned a Umidigi F1 for the past two years, and I have nothing but positive things to say.
The battery is still fantastic at 5150mAh and still in good condition. It runs stock android. It has a headphone jack and a microsd card slot. Its radio runs on most bands 4g bands. It only cost about $200 and has most of the features of a mid-to-high end phone at the time which would have cost ~$500-$700.
In relation to this story about the "Freedom Phone" people are pointing out how the MicroTek CPU is likely "vulnerable." Most CPU privilege escalation exploits are hard to exploit in practice. You're at a much bigger risk letting google run arbitrary code on your phone. Then again, every Intel CPU made from 1996 until 2019 was "vulnerable" so should we also assign them pariah status?
The battery is still fantastic at 5150mAh and still in good condition. It runs stock android. It has a headphone jack and a microsd card slot. Its radio runs on most bands 4g bands. It only cost about $200 and has most of the features of a mid-to-high end phone at the time which would have cost ~$500-$700.
In relation to this story about the "Freedom Phone" people are pointing out how the MicroTek CPU is likely "vulnerable." Most CPU privilege escalation exploits are hard to exploit in practice. You're at a much bigger risk letting google run arbitrary code on your phone. Then again, every Intel CPU made from 1996 until 2019 was "vulnerable" so should we also assign them pariah status?
That's probably MediaTek, not at all to be confused from the Lavian router vendor MikroTik.
I'm somewhat confused by this emphasis on CPU vulnerabilities. The browsers we run are now ten, twenty million lines of code, and those lines of code are very close to most people's payload. If you want to attack someone, the payload you're looking for is quite likely to be readable for the browser and other apps. It seems much easier to get something into the code of an app the user runs by exploiting some code in maven/npn/rubygems/… than via the CPU.
I'm somewhat confused by this emphasis on CPU vulnerabilities. The browsers we run are now ten, twenty million lines of code, and those lines of code are very close to most people's payload. If you want to attack someone, the payload you're looking for is quite likely to be readable for the browser and other apps. It seems much easier to get something into the code of an app the user runs by exploiting some code in maven/npn/rubygems/… than via the CPU.
I don't know, watching these far-out-right types continually being grifted has a sort of karmic justice to it. Too bad the next big scam on them is this anti-vax bullshit and it's actually going to have a body count...
So it's an Android with pre installed apps.
Android is pretty cool. I wonder if history was different and M$ replaced Google for phones, if we'd have 2 walled prisons.
Android is pretty cool. I wonder if history was different and M$ replaced Google for phones, if we'd have 2 walled prisons.
What you want is coming.
They took Edge,
now they'll take Android, for their new version of Surface Duo.
Convergence for all.
They took Edge,
now they'll take Android, for their new version of Surface Duo.
Convergence for all.
frees you from your money...
The most free I've felt on a phone is with GrapheneOS