Even cheapest phone these days is hundreds times more powerful than PS2, has better camera on par or better with most feature phones back in the days and cellular/wifi. They can be used for detection, automation or just plain fun/gaming.
But no, you can't install Linux to overcome bloated, insecure abandonware (old Androids, iOS). Built-in, hot pillow of a battery that is pain in the ass to remove and even then it can't work without it.
Yours is a wildly misleading analogy. The design of Washing Machines (WMs) contains no elements solely dedicated to preventing the off-label use of them, the analogy with phones would be a WM that comes surrounded by barbed wire, a moat and self-destruct explosives attached to the WM to brick it in case the owner tried to unscrew some screw or another. Then a technician with an unauthorized key for your home visits you whenever he wants and messes with the WM and its "defenses" at his pleasure.
There was no "brief moment of hackability" for WMs because they were always hackable to the max - as much as the basic usage design allowed. The WM manufacturers neither acknowledged nor prevented the conversion of WMs into lathes or any other artifact for that matter, that's up to the owner to decide. So yeah, make phones like WMs and stop crippling and messing with people's property.
Incidentally, the off-label use of drugs saves a lot of lives every year. Should we add poison to them to prevent that? Because that's what phone manufacturers are doing to the their phones under the merciless prodding of the OS suppliers.
I'm wondering now with the prevelance of wifi calling/eSim/mobile data plans if that's even the case anymore.
we have several phones that have even BEEN open-source hw afaik, like Librem and pinephone.
It worked fine when I turned it on, but it's essentially a paperweight now because the US mobile carriers have all upgraded to 5G, and this is a 3G phone.
The thing that struck me while doing this is just how tiny the Nexus One is. It's a full-featured (for the day) smartphone, but it's less than half the size of pretty much all the mainstream smart phones today. Battery life was decent, and the apps were pretty functional.
My current phone is about twice the length, 50% wider, and twice as heavy. Battery life has been getting progressively worse with background apps draining your battery so they can scoop up and market whatever information about you they can. Battery life has also been impacted by the BLE tracking features, which run all the time.
I wish I could upgrade the Nexus One with a 5G radio -- it would be a great phone today.
We were thinking to reproduce this in our hallway, but all the spare touchscreen devices (tablets and phones that were our own and from family/friends) have these integrated batteries, and research seems to suggest that none of them will work without a battery anyways, so we are going to attempt to do something like this with an old iPhone or Android phone.
We have some PinePhones lying around that have removable batteries and run just fine without them, but alas they are so underpowered that they can't really run the bloated HomeAssistant web portal, and we don't want to write a custom frontend.
I will have to give a go at this guide to extend some life to these phones
So it's drawing >1A over a single diode? Let's say 1.4A and 700mV voltage drop over the diode, then it's roughly 1W over the diode. Won't it get pretty hot?
"For 1N4001 Diode, the maximum current carrying capacity is 1A it withstand peaks up to 30A."
https://components101.com/diodes/1n4001-diode-pinout-datashe...
They're also cheap as chips, so worst case if it blows they can swap out for 2 of them like you suggest.
I guess, there is nothing you can do if your provider bans your hardware.
> it seems like it drops to 2g for the call
This means, the poster is using an outdated modem firmware, which should be upgraded by contacting Purism (AFAIK Purism isn't allowed to freely distribute it).
Calls seem to work fine for me.
