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Comment by tom_mellior | Hacker News Reader

Wow. On the one hand, this is really cool. On the other hand, it's 600 USD for a phone that might be delivered in a year and a half and will not be able to run Signal.

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It will run debian though, which is way cooler!

Plus, you might just be able to use anbox to run signal anyways. https://anbox.io/

Not running Signal seems like a security feature to me. The official Signal servers, and their stance on requiring a phone number and forbidding 3rd party clients is absurd.

What's the alternative? iOS has a poor story for jabber support, and the network effects for jabber are poor; the gradual network onboarding of signal made it easy to capture new users, but made it federation hostile.

At the moment, I think Matrix is a solid contender. It's easy enough to use a public servers like matrix.org, or riot.im, or run your own.

It's far from a perfect solution, but I feel like it comes closer to the mark than Signal.

The GPD Pocket is shipping for 500 USD, https://liliputing.com/2017/06/gpd-pocket-7-inch-windows-lap...

https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPocket/comments/6idnia/linux_on_...

As far as I can tell, that doesn't have a SIM card slot, so it's not quite comparable to a mobile phone. I don't care that much about making calls, but mobile Internet access does matter in discussions about smartphones.

I have one. You're correct; it does not have a sim slot.

> 600 USD

Oh, nevermind, they take Bitcoin, which means other people paid for my new phone :-)

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