07-29-2026, 07:29 AM
(07-28-2026, 02:40 PM)MaSk Wrote: I've spent a lot of time thinking about the friction of using a modern phone and I think it comes down to one thing: every device today stands alone, closed and fixed, telling you exactly what it is and how you're allowed to use it. Little to no expandability, in hardware or software.
I think it's time to challenge that. That belief led me to write a hacker phone manifesto — an attempt to revisit the values behind devices like the N900, and sketch what a phone that's open and hardware-expandable could actually look like.
I'd love to hear whether people think this is technically viable today, or whether the market killed that idea for good reasons. And if this is off-topic here, I apologize in advance, you can point me some place better.
https://beyondframe.ink/hacker-phone-the...-hardware/
Unfortunately the amount of useful discourse on the pine forum has dropped off to nearly nothing. But just so you know both the pinephone and the librem have hacker interfaces, these were the other half to the hardware paranoia switches. Initially I had wanted a soldered down POCSAG pager unit with a modem paranoia switch on the Neo900, Joerg(at GDC & maemo forums) responded with the hacker interface; so that we could be fully undetectable but still able to be contacted via pager signal. Now you see that connection enabling pinephone keyboard, satellite messaging, IR cameras, LoRa, etc. You can get a pogo-pin adapter ribbon form the pine64 store to interface with the i2c and power pins.