I don't see evidence of the boards being modified by a 3rd party
per se (other than a poor soldering job when compared with the rest of the
board).
The most obvious modification appears to be passive capacitors (1206), wire,
and globs of solder.
It would be more probable that the supplier made a mistake or wished to
improve the circuit and did a hack job instead of iterating the PCB,
which would be a more expensive operation for the supplier.
^ This is exactly what I started doing three years ago and love it. No more tiny rectangle screens stealing my attention; no more endless scrolling, notifications, tiny keyboards, or app stores; no more feeding the data monsters or being forced to upgrade when things fall out of support. Tons more time to think more deeply about things. Still very well connected via email, www, and VoIP, and I do have a work phone, but it's only used for work-related calls and SMS.
I opened an account with voip.ms after ditching my smartphone last year
and was pleasantly surprised with the reliability and interoperability.
Works decently well with Linphone, ATA devices, forwarding to a dumb
phone, land line, etc. With it you can also receive SMS messages (and
reply to them) by email.
Email has increasingly become my preferred method of communication over
the past few years.
As the popularity of other instant messaging platforms ebb and flow,
email has remained one of the few ubiquitous methods for discourse,
messaging, and notification.
In addition to its ubiquity, I like that email enables slow thinking /
maintaining focus and doesn't require an always-on internet connection.
I also like that it's decentralized; though some of the bigger players
have certainly gained enough users to control the ecosystem a bit,
Fastmail, ProtonMail, Posteo, Gandi, and others, as well as self-hosting
are all available.
In terms of client software, mu4e has been absolutely fantastic for
searching, and indexing (via mu), threading, marking, replies, etc.
making email work even better. mutt was also a favorite MUA for many
years before my journey into Emacs.
For responding to SMS messages via email, voip.ms gets the job done as a
SMS/email gateway, helping to consolidate the majority of my
asynchronous messages into the same platform.
i3 has been a favorite window manager for a number of years, though I
recently started using EXWM and greatly enjoy the translation layer
(simulation-keys) that allows Emacs key bindings to be used in other
applications.
The most obvious modification appears to be passive capacitors (1206), wire, and globs of solder.
It would be more probable that the supplier made a mistake or wished to improve the circuit and did a hack job instead of iterating the PCB, which would be a more expensive operation for the supplier.