gemini://ew.srht.site/en/2021/20210208-re-three-phones.gmi

> To the amusement of my wife, children, and others, I'm currently juggling 3 mobile phones.

I did get an "openMoko Neo" when they were a thing. It was my first mobile phone ever. I especially loved to login via ssh over the usb cable! Fantastic! However, the poor thing was a little small. After the (fairly expensive) upgrade of the motherboard (yes, done by myself!) it was quite usable --- unless in bright daylight :/

Years went by and in May 2018 I received a fairphone2 after a long wait. I love this phone. It is repairable, no doubt. Replacing the camera or the display? 10 Minutes. So everything seemed nice. I installed LineageOS and the fdroid store app, and everything was cool.

However, it turns out, I'm not much of a mobile phone person. I don't have it with me constantly. I do not use it as my calendar, I do not use all the alarms and subscriptions. I failed miserably on the sync front I did not upgrade from my prepaid SIM card --- no data over GSM. Airplane mode makes the battery last for a week. Great! I do occasionally take a photo. I did use it as satnav like twice a year or so. I used it as a SMS receiver for 2 factor auth. I send/recv SMS sometimes to arrange for pickup. That's it.

Last week the fairphone gave up. WLAN and GSM died. I cannot cleanly reinstall it. It might work as a satnav but I'm not going to try. To me it seems that the core module (CPU, periphery, flash) is broken. It started to develop signs of flash maybe being broken about a year ago. A replacement core module is not easily available any more.

The openmoko still works to receive SMS. And lets face it: On a Chaos Communications Congress a few years back it made me receive the title "hardcore nerd" from a fellow hacker :)))

Should I ever feel compelled to have another mobile phone, I'll probably get a 30 Eu stupid phone, folding away neatly. And it might even survive the daily commute in the backpack.

2021-02-08

Re: Three Phones!