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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Can we just build phones with a basic x86/AMD64 architecture and a small BIOS so we can load any OS onto them easily from a micro SD? I recently tried to get Halium boot running for my mobile, it's nigh on impossible if it's more than a few years old. (This was in an attempt to load Ubuntu OS onto it.)

Why does it have to be this difficult to try a different OS, when loading an OS onto a new laptop is so relatively easy? It shouldn't be so difficult to get basic functionality up and running.

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AFAIK PinePhone first edition will run like this. A MVP OS in NAND and in-development Linux Mobile distros (UBPorts, Plasma Mobile, KaiOS et al) running directly from MicroSD

They have a guaranteed customer if this is the case. PineTime also makes me quite excited.

The problem isn't technical. It's about control (not the user's obviously), and 'must-have' apps that run only on Android and IOS.

Maybe for some, but why almost all but a few "indie" phones are locked down in this way? I suspect it's more about cost as having a "motherboard" chip means increasing the BOM and pushes an already tight PCB layout to be tighter. Still, I really hope there is some way to incentivize manufacturers to do this.

The Nokia 9000 had a 286:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

As I said in different comment, without something like a BIOS to get some code running with some basic functionality, things are quite difficult [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21005593

If you can do that today with a battery life of over 8 hours (and OS drivers for the cellular modems) I'll be impressed.

Eh, it's not that difficult. What do you think uses all the power in your phone? It's the display, WiFi, cellular, etc. Most of the time your CPU is under-clocked to save power and reduce heat. A lot of the Intel Atom chips will run as passively as an ARM chip will with comparable throughput.

The only thing is PCB space, but even then, I wouldn't except modern chip processes not being able to replicate the BIOS setup in a small chip. It should even be possible to get a BIOS into the same die as the processor to save space.

By the way, the reason for wanting x86/AMD64 is because OSes that support a BIOS are already built for these architectures, whereas anybody building OSes for ARM doesn't expect such niceties, hence the current state of mobile phone OSes. If ARM gained BIOS support, it would too be suitable.

Wasn’t that kind of what Windows Phone was? An x86 based phone?

No, they used arm.

Also, there are x86 android devices but I wouldn't expect them to be any more friendly than arm-devices.

> Also, there are x86 android devices but I wouldn't expect them to be any more friendly than arm-devices.

Yeah, without some kind of boot code (i.e. BIOS or UEFI) to help get the ball rolling, you essentially have the same problem.

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