cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/hardware/p/2144337/commodore-announces-linux-based-flip-phone-with-no-social-media-no-browser-the-callback
Linux-based phone still ‘runs 99% of Android apps’ so you can do more with it, if you wish.
Great initiative but at this price it’s just a scam srlsy…
My sentiments exactly. They’re charging $499 for $5-100 worth of hardware.
This is the “snakes on a plane” of phones.
Nostalgia sells
Jolla phone and that is with much better specs
I would expect to pay $50 for a modern flip phone with hardware comparable to one from 20y ago. But this is running Sailfish OS, has a decent SoC, camera, DAC, and up to 64GB of RAM. This ain’t your grandma’s flip phone.
Not sure if it’s me or you misreading this, but I believe when it says 4GB/64GB it’s one model, 4GB of RAM and 64GB internal storage. 64GB of RAM at a form factor to fit in a phone that small is currently outwith our technological capacity surely
Ah yeah, I misread that. I agree $500 is high for what it is, but it’s also kind of a novelty device that they’ll surely only make a relatively small number of to guage interest. The industry has shifted all of its manufacturing away from making flip phones cheap.
That is the price if you ship million of units. Realistically, how many units can ship this? 10k? 20k?
Once you consider the price of the plastic shell molds (custom), the custom keypad, the custom motherboard, the custom assembly line, this price is almost cheap.
I wouldn’t even consider a purchase even at a third of the price, but it was a scam if they simply put a sticker on some Alibaba clamshell with stock android, instead here they even partnered with Jolla to have sailfish is as base with the android emulator. That’s much more expensive than just slapping android aosp with a minimal launcher and calling it a day
People pay over $1k for a phone. Now that is a scam.
But those phones are mini computers, some of which people use as an actual desktop.
or you can get an actual desktop – and even laptops – for less money and a better experience.
They lost me at $499. A phone that is just a phone should be about a hundred bucks max. I didn’t read the article though. Maybe it’s still very computery.
Small production run + half-decent internals probably accounts for a lot of the price.
Having experimented with $100 underpowered flip phone on KaiOS, lack of apps was a real problem. What (some) people want is the slight inconvenience of a T9 keyboard and an annoyingly small screen to help them limit their screen time, but they still want full functionality of all their apps.
as someone who has been using t9 phones for the last 3-4 years, the tough part is will the software and keys even be good on this. you just don’t know till you use it. It’s true, having an underpowered phone sucks ( I’m using the Sonim X320 now which I believe has 4GB of ram, and it’s soooo nice compared to the Cat S22 Flip ). But a lot of issues on my previous phones (prev mentioned Cat, then the Qin F25) was mostly the software not working well with buttons or the screen size. The sonim I have now works well because the stock apps a designed for the hard ware. $450 or whatever is still too much, but if it covers all the bands and use usable, at least it’s an option.
I know some people who would actually kill for a physical T9 keyboard so they could touch-type. It’s not my cup of tea, but I can definitely see it being a major draw for people who grew up texting on a real flip phone.
I thought it woud suck, but with the touch typing + consistent dictionary guessing, it’s really on par with the random chaos of a touchscreen keyboard.
Just found out about the Twiddler 4–a single-handheld bluetooth keyboard. too damn expensive at over $200, but something I’d definitely try otherwise.
Look, I love the idea of a Linux phone.
But $500 and it manages my temptations for me? Fuck no.
The whole point of Linux is freedom.
Enough behavior shaping.
Yeh right, i already don’t use social media on my phone, skill issue
Social media is humans being social through media, I am sick and tired of it being categorically villainized especially because the scientific evidence for it being inherently bad is laughable.
No browser is wild. And what does that even mean here? You have to run everything by app now? That sounds like ass.
What is the point of it being linux if it just runs “99% of android apps” but no browser?
To say that social media is just people socializing through media is rather like saying that newspapers are just news on paper.
In both cases it ignores the deliberate, pervasive, and frequently toxic efforts of the platform curators to maximize “engagement” with their audience in pursuit of ad revenue.
When I socialize with people offline, it looks almost nothing like modern social media “services”.
In both cases it ignores the deliberate, pervasive, and frequently toxic efforts of the platform curators to maximize “engagement” with their audience in pursuit of ad revenue.
We are on social media right now, this is not inherent to social media it is a choice forced on it by corporations.
MediaTek Helio G81 SoC, with 4GB/64GB
Uhhh. For $500? Sorry, no.
I mean its a small company. We have become too used to subsidized costs at the sake of our privacy. Know why TVs are now $200? They are literal spyware in the home. Try buying one without spyware, $999 real fast for the same TV.
Know why phone companies give you a “free” $1000 phone? Youre the product. Constantly tracked and sold. A digital slave.
Pinephone was a fraction of that price. Can’t you run PostmarketOS on a Fair phone too? But that has much better specs.
The pinephone was atrocious (As a daily) though. From what I’ve heard from owners it still struggles to this day to run basic mobile Linux OSes.
Fact. It’s amazing that it exists, but it is definitely not a daily driver device. At least for me.
Uhh the pinephone in general sucks for daily use . its a tinker phone
Really? I thought mine was great
Buuutt are you someone who travels and uses airline and banking and hotel apps? Or do you stay home and use arch on a thinkpad ?
/joky
I have done all of those things without apps. Why the fuck would I want an airline and hotel app?
Hotel: check in to room immediately without even going to front desk, even if its 3 am.
Airline: instant update of gate changes. When you need to sprint to make your flight because thr gate changed to one a half mile away, this is something you can’t live without. TVs are getting less and less in airports now. Also, literally no one uses a paper ticket and I suspect they’ll be phased out completely in 5 years. Too easy to fake.
There are people alive today who have never once written a check (I do, often), so you can kiss all of our old analog paper ways goodbye in a few years.
Almost nothing works on it. Can make calls, but not receive, can open the camera, but not take a photo, etc.
Who would I be getting calls from? I use Linux.
Phone companies dont give you a “free” $1000 phone, you’re actually paying more for it via the monthly bill payments.
That’s on top of you being the product as well.
True
People don’t know this it seems. You actually have to give up something to gain some privacy. Can be money, can be features.
Most people still use Google while there is Kagi for like 10 dollars… Because they want privacy, but they need it to be free. :)
My daily argument with my friends!
Opposed to fake fast?
Not free, and on pixels you can install de googled androids like grapheneos and LineageOS
Economies of scale. How many people actually want to buy this?
Browser and email is the bare minimum, though.
Even the cheapest clamshells in the 2000s had those two.
Don’t preinstall it by default if you want to look minimal but being forced to sideload (their app store blocks this essential category???) an Android APK in the emulator instead of using native Linux apps for that, is ridiculous
I understand that for a small company like them (it’s being owned by a YouTuber now) creating hardware is extremely expensive and 499 can even considered cheap with all the custom stuff in this device, plastic molds, dedicated assembly lines and so on, but my mind can’t accept paying more than 149 for something like this
I didn’t even know that the brand Commodore still existed.
Every few years the brand name appears to be sold to some new company
$499? No thanks
It’s like that era of putting pink ribbons on everything for breast cancer that also signaled you were a supporter of women. Commercialized activism. Be real. This will sell very little. We’ll get some news articles about how it’s trending with Gen z that are rejecting technology and always online culture. It’ll actually only be a small amount of Gen z but you know blogspam going to blogspam.
It’s a crappy product. We need a Linux phone that would actually be a halo product for people to not feel like they’re ripping themselves off to get away from Google and Apple
That’s a stupid price, one of the main things of brick/flip phones is their low price, HMD feature phones range from about £20 to £70, some new google pixels can go for about this price, so getting something with the price of a smartphone with a fraction of the features sounds scummy.
How does it not have social media or browser if so many apps are compatible? Doesn’t that amount of compatibility mean we can still have social media and browsers?
Based on the article, they have a blocklist of certain apps. You can only install apps they allow. Not sure how extensive the list is, but surely the most popular ones are blocked and they will probably update the list.
Lmao
You can only install apps they allow.
Untrue, the article clearly says that you can sideload anything you want.
Do I misunderstand the article? They state following:
Users are still able to sideload apps outside those that are blocked, using APK installer files
Meaning you can only sideload apps, that are not blocked. So you would not be able to install anything they do not allow to.
You misunderstand, the list of apps they block are “inside” the said list, while sideloading apps “outside” of the said list is possible. So you can only find and install whatever apps they’ve approved within whatever app store they use to serve apps to their customers, but you can install any apk on the phone by sideloading it, given the app supports the phones CPU architecture of course.
“Users are still able to”: Means despite the block list in the operating system, users can still do following…
“sideload apps”: … install applications manually outside the app store…
“those that are not blocked”: … applications not in the known block list from the company.
I don’t know how one can interpret this differently. Where does the “inside” and “outside” interpretation come from?
You can sideload apps, whether they are on the blocklist or not. That’s what the sentence* you quoted says. Well, that’s what I interpret anyways. Maybe I’m wrong.
I broke it down for you and explained each part. And that does not align with your interpretation. That’s why I asked you where your interpretation comes from. “sideload apps those that are not blocked” means “sideload apps that are not on blocklist”. Where does this paragraph states, that it allows to install apps whether they are on the blocklist or not? Could you explain it?
Zero justification for that price tag.
no social media, no browser
marketing material: social media in a glorified browserAt $200… Maybe.
AI slop video, no faith in what will (or likely won’t) be delivered.
I can get a new modern smartphone which works without major problems at $80. I see no reason to spend double that on a flip phone.
Who is going to pay $500 for a retro flip phone, when you can get a second-hand iPhone for half that? Or you know, an actual flip phone for $25.
Maybe the same guys who believed in the Purism scam.
499? hahahhaa
My first thought was, this might be about just what’s installed by default. Reading a bit further the article says:
Apparently, the OS has hard blocks to stop the installation of browsers and social media apps.
“Users are still able to sideload apps outside those that are blocked, using APK installer files…”
So I’m not sure why I would want pay 500 Dollars / Euros, just so they have control over what I can install and not. To me this would be a deal breaker. Also this seems to be “basically a custom version of the Jolla Sailfish OS”, so there are probably “better” options using the same OS. And it only has 4GB of RAM? I am not impressed for the price and for the control.
