It doesn't need to have a cutting-edge processor or tons of RAM and storage space or a 120hz screen or razor-thin bezels or a studio-worthy camera, yet somehow all these things are prioritized on the market over a basic, reliable phone.
Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.
Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.
The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.
EDIT: I forgot to check the "removable battery" checkbox; with it you get zero matching phones. Maybe you should've checked that before assuming GP just can't search.
Not to end on such a negative note, foregoing a maimum height and the removable battery, Sony's Xperia 5 and 10 fit the rest of the requirements and are very good phones. Hard to find for sale in the last few years, though.
But I main the $900 pixel.
They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.
As a wifi internet device it would work but I'm not sure that's what OP is going for.
Can we do 2010s phones with 2020s battery tech and modems please?
https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-d...
> Note: New devices XQ-CT62 (1Ⅳ US variant) and XQ-CQ62 (5Ⅳ US variant) do not support bootloader unlock.
https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-bootloader-and-root-guide-xpe...
Banks don't need to know if I unlocked my bootloader.
I can't even use the Waymo app either.
The problem is that app makers are lazy.
They absolutely do not have any need to know anything about my bootloader or OS version or safety net or otherwise. It's certainly true that it is within the realm of physical possibility for them to put that information to good use in a responsible manner if they had access to it. But being able to make use of something is not the same as a legitimate need.
For example, you have to say or otherwise signal that you authorize the transaction to x person for y amount on z date.
I kind of do it with my tenants when I record a video walk through at the beginning and end of the lease to serve as proof of damages. I could use a checklist on paper and a signature, but I feel like a video is better evidence for me.
If the process requires anything beyond "internet access" I'm not purchasing the device.
Pinephone and Librem 5 (my daily driver) do not have a locked bootloader in the first place. They are just little (GNU/)Linux computers.
> "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive"
> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"
Adding my own experience: the battery life is also atrocious[0] and simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.
[0] Sitting on a shelf, with the screen off, not connected to cellular networks, not being used at all except to check the battery % periodically throughout the day: I got ~11 hours of battery life. My pixel 10 has been operating under the same conditions for 4 days and is still at 71% battery life (I'm intentionally draining it down to ~50% for long term storage while I wait for the bootloader to unlock in 2 years).
[1] The phone had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for years. No software had been installed, no accounts had been set up, it had never actually been used as a phone. Could not get more "stock" than that.
First, it is a flagship GNU/Linux phone. Second, https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
> I got ~11 hours of battery life
Looks like you didn't enable the suspend. Later updates brought it to >20 hours.
> simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.
When was it? I never experienced this. It could be a problem in the first years though. Current PureOS Crimson is stable.
This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson (which I did to recover from the infinite boot loop), so if there is some active step that needs to be taken to enable suspend, then I had not done it.
> When was it?
This was within the past month. I see two possible reasons you didn't run into it:
1) You have been applying the updates as they come out, whereas I took a dusty phone that hadn't been turned on in years and ran the update.
2) You were already on crimson, so maybe they only broke byzantium (or whatever version it was on from years of sitting unused and then hitting update in the software center).
This is strange. See this post concerning the battery life: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/. Have you updated the modem firmware?
You are right, I have case 1). It is quite likely that Byzantium is (was) much less stable, as it required a lot of hacks and relied on a very old Debian version.
https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...