Fuck steve jawbs

...

I'll believe it when I see it. I am a computer engineer and I don't believe in this.

to what are you referring to?

Those little electronic kits exist today. I know they exist and it's easy to believe why they would exist today. Project Ara is an interesting idea, but my training in electronic engineering is telling me that this isn't feasible as a mass produced product. Maybe they can get something working in the lab but I won't believe that works as good as today's phones until I buy one and try to use it within the context that I use my phone today.

Because there's no standard architecture. Back when Linux was conceived, there was the "IBM-compatible" PC. Because software was a big freaking deal (most companies had lots of custom applications, many of which where built on IBM platforms), there was lots of pressure to make sure that you bought computers that could run it with minimal modifications. That resulted in a defacto "standard" hardware configuration that the operating system could be designed for.

When smartphones came around, all the "software" that anybody cared about was already written for on-device virtual machines, such as Java. There was no need to develop a standard hardware platform to run a standard set of applications.

As a result, every smartphone essentially gets a highly-customized version of it's operating system suited to it's specific hardware. It's not possible to develop a generic operating system like Linux because there's no standard hardware configuration to count on.

I once had a dream that Holla Forums started it's own fundraiser to kickstart a company that would grow to make secure, private, linuxbased, and opensourced phones and it's own distro.

I remember getting that second thing when I was like 8 years old. I liked it so much the next year my parents got me an Electronics Learning Lab or whatever it's called With the solderless bread board, a buzzer, and a bunch of resistors/capacitors/led's etc. Needless to say I had more fun with the ELL because of how much more freedom it gave me.

The device-specific portability issues are very low-level, and mostly involves parts that Android and "proper Linux" share. Installing (parts of) a proper Linux system with Termux or a chroot is very well supported by Android.

You're talking about installing some Linux features on top of an existing Android system, not running Linux from bare metal. The inability to run something like Linux from bare metal is why the smartphone market is as restricted as it is.

Why are you so shit at everything you do?
maemo.org/
sailfishos.org/

No. Smartphones run Linux (the kernel) directly on bare metal. In a chroot the rest of the operating system runs directly on the kernel. Not to mention that the low-level Android userland doesn't involve any Java, and its init system has even been ported to proper GNU/Linux up to a point.
blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/05/0-androidinit/

What happened to that phone OS that big name companies like Samsung were funding that was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread?

It got toasted.

with a citation required tag

because google were going to make this then cancelled and released a phone that's like any other

Because le happy merchent

They killed it long before it was canceled. Toward the end they announced you wouldn't be able to swap out anything related to internal function, the battery, or the screen. At the end your module choices included cameras, kickstands, and Tic-Tac dispensers.

Please tell me that's a joke.

WAKE ME UP

Has anyone else been following pic related?
neo900.org/

Will it ever get made?

Ara is dead.
Google would only ever take on such a pro-consumer project to only ruin it and convince everyone it can't be done.

Do not worry though, google is developing fuschia
Whatever will come out of that...

Closest thing I can think of is the Dragonbox Pyra, although that's less of a phone and more of a tiny laptop with phoning capabilities. All it's important parts are on a SoC, so in theory you can swap them out to upgrade. Only problem is it's not out yet, it's fucking expensive and you have to find a SoC that does what you want, rather than building one yourself.
As for micro-sized components Hardkernel made a standard connector for their Odroid boards that lets you add eMMC storage. It's an eMMC package on a tiny board, which you snap onto the bottom of the SBC. I could see that being used for RAM easily enough.

I always kind of wondered why no hobbyist has ever built a cellphone based on a Raspberry Pi.

I remember fucking teenagers on Holla Forums arguing not allowing a screen change was good because normies would be able to change their broken screens and that was haram.

Holla Forums wew

Because every combination of hardware would need to be tested for Wireless performance and more importantly compliance with each countries safety standards.

Anyone who is not 12 years old knows that a dipole antenna relies on the circuit board ground plane as part of its performance characteristic. Anything you do to alter the ground plane is going to mess with your aerial.

You could have something like a ram socket on a phone. Because they would just need to do 2 tests one with the ram installed and one with it not. But anything more complex and free than that would be completely insane in terms of testing each combination.

Imagine if they had ten different graphics cards and you wanted to bring out an 11th model.
There would need to be 10 factorial number of tests. Which is 3628800 tests each one being $10,000 each!!

Just looking at that picture shows the entire problem.

You have a very chunky thick mobile phone thats mostly comprised of the aluminium frame, but it has a 110mAh battery. That is fucking pathetic. If you think your iphone runs out fast with its 2900mAh battery just try that one.

This whole concept is great for separating normies from their money on kikestarter but not for creating products that will exist in the real world.

you can build your own phone using a raspberry pi
youtube.com/watch?v=8eaiNsFhtI8

or
with an arduino

or with a banana orange or any other pi, pine64 or possibly chip, which is already so small it seems like a no brainer for a diy phone

I think that battery was just for development reasons.

youtube.com/watch?v=6oZbqRbQJm8

Imagine if you could plug cellular modems and wifi cards into normal computers. The US would be 15 trillion dollars in debt!!

What is Ubuntu Touch? What is Plasma Mobile? What is SailfishOS?

it has closer to a decade old specs, even if it got made.

I looked into this recently and you'd have to pay like $200 for a 3G shield, which is a lot for what's basically a dumbphone

fair point, but I'm tired of Apple raping me

Why? What does it do that can't be done by a used smartphone running Replicant (similar or better specs, cheap, and available now, but not everything works due to lack of free drivers), a Neo Freerunner (much cheaper, available now, but slightly worse specs), or a Dragonbox Pyra (better specs, cheaper, will probably ship sooner than the Neo900, and fully isolates the baseband processor like the Neo900 supposedly will)? Fuck, change the "or" in the last sentence to "and" because you could get one of each for the price of the Neo900. There's no reason for the Neo900 to exist other than to separate nostalgiafags from their excess money.