[Tinkerphones] ZeroPhone site offline

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday, 29 December 2021 10:15:45 CET H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> > Am 28.12.2021 um 20:40 schrieb Martin <debacle at debian.org>:
> > 
> > On 2021-12-28 19:35, Dr. Michael Lauer wrote:
> >> That’s a pity. In particular with the recent Pi Zero 2 design that
> >> could’ve been a pretty sweet alternative feature phone.
> > 
> > My main problem with the ZP was the extremely small display.
> > I'm just too old to be able to read it without magnifying glass.
> > Apart from that it was a very cool phone!
> 
> Indeed, it was a nice and good idea for its time.

I must admit that I was worried about the choice of Raspberry Pi hardware, 
given the proliferation of different models with different characteristics (as 
you discovered a while ago, Nikolaus), meaning that extra caution is required 
even when basing a design on a particular device. And I am also not enamoured 
by the way the Raspberry Pi initiative operates.

But I think it was a nice idea to take something that already existed and to 
adapt it in this way. A long time ago, the Gumstix products were used as the 
basis for a phone-like project in a similar way:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100127031815/http://www.gizmoforyou.net/site/
shop/flow-g1-5.html

Obviously, there are still going to be challenges with the physical design of 
a device, whether it can be used and accepted, but my impression was that the 
ZeroPhone was the first step along a particular path, so it is unfortunate 
that perhaps that path is no longer navigable. I hope that Arsenijs is still 
in a position to pursue such things or is at least finding something else that 
is rewarding to pursue.

> But to be curious: what would you do with a feature phone nowadays?
> If there is a browser it is crap. Games? Banking? Navigation? Messenger?
> My mother-in-law has one, just in case she must do a phone call.
> There is one more: receiving SMS for banking or 2-factor authentication.

I think society has to reconsider how technology should be used to get things 
done. One interesting example is this:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/12/27/Small-Utopia

There is a kind of consumerist mentality which starts out with people buying 
new and shiny things, and then the mechanisms of society require everyone to 
buy those gadgets. And instead of making the technology fit the processes, it 
is the other way round.

Hence the remarks in that article about a convenient user experience that 
lacks a lot of the traits of the modern technological experience, these traits 
mostly amounting to frivolous visual "design" and the tendency to want to 
monetise everything through surveillance. Although Web technologies have given 
people flexibility, the last two or so decades have seen the indulgence of 
wasteful and even harmful practices in delivering technological solutions.

That this is typically excused by references to technological progress just 
shows how little things have changed since everyone accused Microsoft and 
Intel of conspiring to make everyone upgrade their computer every couple of 
years. Sadly, this means that unless we recognise the fundamental social 
dynamics of this phenomenon and encourage sustainable and considerate use of 
technology, we will continue to see the latest smartphone being mandated for a 
lot of people's participation in matters of commerce, governance and even 
access to education and healthcare.

> Next question: are there enough interested developers for writing free
> software?

This is where the Free Software Foundation and others simply fail to deliver. 
We've mentioned the "Ethical Tech Giving Guide" before:

https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/

Where are we now with that? The recommendations are to find specific models of 
old phones and computers and to install something that hopefully works, with a 
couple of vendors willing to sell some refurbished ThinkPads. I guess no-one 
can source old phones reliably any more.

(It is interesting to go back to earlier editions of that guide by editing the 
"v12" in the URL, going all the way back to "v6". Not that there is so much 
variation in the offerings.)

No-one is going to target open hardware with Free Software if no-one makes the 
hardware. But the likes of the FSF have this entrenched "volunteers welcome" 
mentality where people magically show up and do the work for free, and where 
advocacy and enthusiasm gets you most of the way. And the broader attitudes 
are predictably consumerist, too: if one initiative fails then "the market" 
will provide another to back until that fails, too. If people are encouraged 
to do this "for the movement" then they will happily "volunteer" their time 
and money to their own detriment, while those who could actually coordinate 
and fund real change just squander their resources on advocacy and posturing.

I guess this is all "broken record" talk, though, given that I apparently 
wrote the following back at the start of this year:

"Personally, I just see this as another reminder that any activity directed 
towards furthering our goals must be sustainable, and that picking apparent 
winners - a consumerist approach that one might regard as uncharacteristic for 
an organisation like the FSF - typically fails to deliver meaningful and 
lasting change."

The only change I would make to that statement is that consumerism is hardly 
uncharacteristic for an organisation that clearly cannot escape its cultural 
context, despite being a target of wild accusations of communism, socialism 
and all the other dirty words of American political discourse.

I suppose that the PinePhone might show a way to a brighter future, given that 
devices are being made and shipped, and given that there are a few different 
software environments under active development for that hardware platform. 
Hopefully, people will be able to refine the user experience with these 
environments and that there will be a genuine cycle of feedback and 
improvement that is now generally lacking on the desktop.

> And one more thing to consider is the power demand of a non-phone-processor.
> Especially the ∏02 needs much more energy or must be heavily underclocked
> (if that is possible at all).
> 
> Even the N900 upstream kernel is wrestling with power management of the
> good old omap3.
> 
> The key feature of a featurephone over a smartphone is that it can
> run 100 hours or more in standby but wake up immediately. And all that
> coming in a small and lightweight case with big buttons and display.
> 
> This combination of requirements is very difficult to achieve with
> off-the-shelf components.

I wonder how well the MIPS-based CPUs hold up in this regard. A lot has been 
made over the years about how power efficient ARM processors are, going back 
to the anecdote about the first one being brought up that gets retold 
frequently in certain circles, but my impression was that the simplicity of 
traditional MIPS cores lends itself to some very low-power designs. And even 
if most semiconductor vendors outside of China have given up on MIPS (along 
with the current owners of MIPS Inc., apparently), there are always its 
successors in the form of OpenRISC (used in certain Allwinner ARM SoCs) and, 
more prominently, RISC-V.

Paul