Flip phone, low power, long battery life

[vandys]

Hi!  I have a Pinetab, RockPro64, and Pinephone.  Love them all.

The Pinephone is big, and burns hard on its battery (even w. CRUST).  Please consider a flip phone with a battery-sipping processor (MAX32660, STM32L151C6, etc.) very modest RAM/flash, lightweight screen (like Nokia 8110).  Still open source, but probably not Linux--certainly not Phosh or friends!  But capable of running for days, or weeks, or months.  Thin software stack, maybe based on ChiBIOS or such?

You already have one commenter here looking for a sub-Smarthphone.  This is my take on the idea!

TIA

[ryo]

The Pinephone is big, and burns hard on its battery (even w. CRUST).

Try full software update through the Software app.
I applied them multiple times, and battery has improved by a lot since then.
Still not on the same level as a Android of iOS phones, but probably double of what it used to be.

I have a suspicion that you're meaning something like this:

[poVoq]

There are such phones, running KaiOS (or the fully open-source version of it GerdaOS). KaiOS is a fork of FirefoxOS modified to run on so called smart feature phones.

I have one of these and they are quite ok, but the open-source software ecosystem isn't very active, thus I don't think it would be a good fit for Pine64 who depend on the community to develop the software.

[zetabeta]

@ original post
i tend to think it might not be good idea at this time, however i don't know what future holds.

you didn't specify price for this product. i have feeling it might be too expensive to be useful. battery life for weeks sounds little bit too optimistic.

for development of this product, developing something totally new might be a big task. kde plasma mobile and phosh might be too heavy for this. however, if pinephone gets something lighter, it can be useful for this idea though.

[barray]

@vandys For these reason I hope to hear more about the PineCom project soon - I hope to build a small lightweight WiFi phone out of it.

[ryo]

@ original post
i tend to think it might not be good idea at this time, however i don't know what future holds.

you didn't specify price for this product. i have feeling it might be too expensive to be useful. battery life for weeks sounds little bit too optimistic.

for development of this product, developing something totally new might be a big task. kde plasma mobile and phosh might be too heavy for this. however, if pinephone gets something lighter, it can be useful for this idea though.

The battery of the flip phone I photographed a few posts above can easily last an entire month without charging (assuming you leave it mostly on idle).
Flip phones nowadays run off a degoogled Android OS, so it's possible to install Android apps on them via adb (like I showed on the 2nd photo).

The 10-key keyboard doubles as a trackpad with a cursor on-screen by the way, you need to slide over it without pressing anything.

[vandys]

Thank you for your ideas! I have an 8110 w. GerdaOS. Big, monolithic, clunky OS. sxmo w. PostmarketOS is closer, but even smaller and easier to hack would be nice. Price is not a big deal, $100 or $200 even would be OK. Not $600 or $1200!

[zetabeta]

The battery of the flip phone I photographed a few posts above can easily last an entire month without charging (assuming you leave it mostly on idle).
Flip phones nowadays run off a degoogled Android OS, so it's possible to install Android apps on them via adb (like I showed on the 2nd photo).

i don't doubt you're claim on degoogled android on battery life. if device is only available on android, i'm not interested. i don't trust android anymore, even with degoogled version it's still google's project.

btw, i still have one degoogled modified android, because of its big battery it can last for week, roughly saying.

[ryo]

The battery of the flip phone I photographed a few posts above can easily last an entire month without charging (assuming you leave it mostly on idle).
Flip phones nowadays run off a degoogled Android OS, so it's possible to install Android apps on them via adb (like I showed on the 2nd photo).

i don't doubt you're claim on degoogled android on battery life. if device is only available on android, i'm not interested. i don't trust android anymore, even with degoogled version it's still google's project.

btw, i still have one degoogled modified android, because of its big battery it can last for week, roughly saying.

I just said that flip phones nowadays run on a degoogled Android OS, it doesn't mean that's the reason why the battery can last a month.
I think the reason is rather because the Android that runs on flip phones can use only 1 app at a time, and there are no background processes other than network (3G, 4G, LTE, WiFi, and Bluetooth), phone and email notifications, alarm clock, and system update notification.

Which on one hand is inconvenient, because if I'd use a chat app like LINE or Discord on it, I have no idea whenever somebody talks to me (and in the case of LINE, called to me) until I explicitly open the app.