Originally published at: The best dumbphone gets Signal messaging | Boing Boing
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“Our minimalist phone has more feature creep than the other guys!” is a weird marketing tack, but you do you, Punkt.
I think it’s fair to expand what it does so long as it’s “vertical” within a defined function.
For example, adding protocols (such as Signal) to the messaging/voice that’s already there is good.
But adding, say, a separate Facebook app with messaging would be bad.
I got mildly interested, but one of the first reviews I found pointed out that it has an abysmally bad battery life for it’s reduced feature set.
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Just remember: less is more to pay
threehundredfiftyfuckingbucks?!? jah, well, but no; thats a pass for me, my old nokia C2-01 will still have to do as dumb phone for the time being, till Im rich enough to escape the surveillance, late-stage capitalism with a sort-of anti-surveillance, late-stage capitalism-produced phone.
nuts. its all nuts. our so called “civilization” is just fucking nuts.
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Agreed. A Snapdragon 210 with a 320x240 screen and no real keyboard…the only good thing is the size and weight at 100g. With mass production I feel like this should cost less than $50, maybe $100.
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As long as you have a cell-phone, you won’t be able to escape the surveillance. They don’t need access to your phone or conversations to know where your phone is at all times.
Until you shut down your phone (and trust that it actually shuts down) and use it only when you need to call out, you’re being tracked - fancy dumb phones can’t do anything against that 
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Nah, I am fine with a niche product costing more. You can’t compare something like this a conventional phone produced with the economies of scale.
That being said, does the buttons have to look that shit?
Nice addition, but going back to a T9 keyboard at this point is excruciating.
I chose the Lightphone II, and am really happy with it. It has a couple of additional features (music, podcasts) with more in the works, but I leave those off. Its point, which it makes with its pretty elegant design, is to not sell your attention, but to leave you alone to live your life.
The more of these devices the better!
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I tried using my punkt a coupla times, but it was missing ui and crashing/losing texts earlier on, and then I got another moto (that cost less) that gets the job done and I never looked back.
Also, every time you boot the thing up, it plays a bird noise that I couldn’t turn off, and honestly that really irked me. I should sell it, then I can feel better about the whole situation.
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There’s at least a decent chance a cell manufacturer like this isn’t harvesting all your data. So one less person spying on you.
Has anyone else heard about Bunnie Huang’s latest project precursor ? ( Precursor | Crowd Supply)
The goal is to create hardware that a somewhat sophisticated user can verify if the device has been comprised at the hardware level. It’s basically an fpga, a mono screen, and a keyboard. A lot of the hardware is using old tech that you can use a magnifier to examine and because it’s an FPGA you can flash with some RISC-V cores / crypto hardware accelerators that you trust from a software repository. That means it’ll likely be slightly more powerful than a late 2000’s palm pilot. It’s a really neat idea, but at $565 dollars and no LTE modem out of the box my cyberpunk dream of having a hardware hack-able secure mobile messaging device will likely have to wait…
Even then I nearly ordered one, But I know myself well enough that’ll I’ll play with it for two weeks then forget about it.
The problem, I think, is that it has a full-scale smartphone OS with a simplified UI and feature set. 50 years of unix lurking under the battery cover.
The first model was a 2G phone with the same ultra-simple but very limited OS you’ll find in various other offbrand minimal 2G phones such as the Lebedev Brick, but it was a dead end (and the lights are going out on 2G now, too). Battery life was great, though.
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Is it the MP02? I have the earlier model and am interested in the new one.
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