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Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone (www.theregister.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 48 points 5 months ago* (7 children)

Those prices. Ouch.

If you don't want to pay a wild premium, you have to contend with a device that is built by Google... and running an OS that is mostly built by Google.

The forks are great and all, but dependency on Google can't be the solution to the problem forever.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    The flx1s listed in the article is selling for $500. That seems fair to me. The more popular offerings in the article are definitely not giving sufficient value for my money.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I can't believe I didn't click on that one... I did not expect to see that combination of relatively low price and high specs. $500 and 8GB RAM.

    The price of the Librem 5 ($800 with 3GB RAM) must have broken my brain

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    The price of the Librem 5 ($800 with 3GB RAM) must have broken my brain

    I think some of the big players like Librem and Pine tend to use zealot pricing, where they're counting on those on the extreme end of linux and privacy to pay for the idea and simply disregard the substandard experience.

    I do understand that not monetizing the user/customer costs more but outfits like FuriLabs shows that you can end up with more than a paperweight for less money.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    AFAIK Librem claims they use separate verified suppliers and builders (compared to more common Android manufacturers, for example). Kind of a zealot thing too though.

    And PinePhone (original) at $200 is not that expensive if you think of it as a compact version of a Linux platform like Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi + charger + battery + touch display + 4G modem + GPS unit + microphone + speaker will probably run close to $200 too.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    There's not really a reason to be upset with a phone running a privacy focused version of Android. Android, at heart, is Linux with some runtime stuff on top. The runtime stuff has open source versions that Google is involved with, but its still open source. There's also independent reimplementations of some of the proprietary Google stuff.

    The thing is, there's really only 2 mobile platforms with any sort of application support: iOS and Android. iOS will probably never have open source versions. If you go outside those 2 platforms, you end up being very limited. You can talk to Amazon, Mozilla, Canonical, Microsoft, Palm, BlackBerry, and others about what that world looks like. So, if you want to have any application support and therefore any traction, the best bet is to take something that's already mostly open source, reimplement the non open source bits, and make sure what's left doesn't depend on Google (though most have a way to use Google services, often is a restricted way, if you need that). That's what /e/OS and GrapheneOS do.

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