Samsung Upcycle Promise
xda-developers.com
xda-developers.com
I was recently in the market for a new phone, and (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus. Samsung and Xiaomi I think both technically support it but it's a pain in the butt practically.
That's... a shockingly small list!? .
In my case, after adding "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive" (eliminating Tensor) and "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance" (eliminating Nothing), OnePlus and Motorola were pretty much the only two options!
Is it that hard to get a phone you can truly own? I don't know, I honestly hope I'm missing something.
It doesn't need to have a cutting-edge processor or tons of RAM and storage space or a 120hz screen or razor-thin bezels or a studio-worthy camera, yet somehow all these things are prioritized on the market over a basic, reliable phone.
Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.
Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.
The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.
But I main the $900 pixel.
They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.
Instead, the phone I got ended up being bigger than my last phone, and hasn't (unsurprisingly) helped my RSI at all. Go figure lol.
No headphone jack (neither the rest)
EDIT: I forgot to check the "removable battery" checkbox; with it you get zero matching phones. Maybe you should've checked that before assuming GP just can't search.
Not to end on such a negative note, foregoing a maimum height and the removable battery, Sony's Xperia 5 and 10 fit the rest of the requirements and are very good phones. Hard to find for sale in the last few years, though.
As a wifi internet device it would work but I'm not sure that's what OP is going for.
Can we do 2010s phones with 2020s battery tech and modems please?
If the process requires anything beyond "internet access" I'm not purchasing the device.
I did have to be careful to buy the variant supported by lineageos. (I think the t mobile version of this phone does require using op form, which I've heard rarely works.)
Banks don't need to know if I unlocked my bootloader.
I can't even use the Waymo app either.
The problem is that app makers are lazy.
They absolutely do not have any need to know anything about my bootloader or OS version or safety net or otherwise. It's certainly true that it is within the realm of physical possibility for them to put that information to good use in a responsible manner if they had access to it. But being able to make use of something is not the same as a legitimate need.
For example, you have to say or otherwise signal that you authorize the transaction to x person for y amount on z date.
I kind of do it with my tenants when I record a video walk through at the beginning and end of the lease to serve as proof of damages. I could use a checklist on paper and a signature, but I feel like a video is better evidence for me.
"We've imagined a hypothetical" is completely different from "we directly observed something that looks criminal". Like if they see that the OS version string is "known-malicious-image" fine but that's totally different.
A good example might be the memo lines on checks. You can never be certain that a string of random numbers doesn't have something to do with criminal activity but the bank won't bother you about it. Whereas when an acquaintance tried to cash a check where someone had jokingly written "thanks for the sex" on the memo line the bank apologized for having to reject it despite realizing that it was almost certainly in jest.
Not to mention Android deletes all your apps and cache if you go from locked to unlocked, and you have to reinstall all of them again.
Pinephone and Librem 5 (my daily driver) do not have a locked bootloader in the first place. They are just little (GNU/)Linux computers.
> "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive"
> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"
Adding my own experience: the battery life is also atrocious[0] and simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.
[0] Sitting on a shelf, with the screen off, not connected to cellular networks, not being used at all except to check the battery % periodically throughout the day: I got ~11 hours of battery life. My pixel 10 has been operating under the same conditions for 4 days and is still at 71% battery life (I'm intentionally draining it down to ~50% for long term storage while I wait for the bootloader to unlock in 2 years).
[1] The phone had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for years. No software had been installed, no accounts had been set up, it had never actually been used as a phone. Could not get more "stock" than that.
First, it is a flagship GNU/Linux phone. Second, https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
> I got ~11 hours of battery life
Looks like you didn't enable the suspend. Later updates brought it to >20 hours.
> simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.
When was it? I never experienced this. It could be a problem in the first years though. Current PureOS Crimson is stable.
This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson (which I did to recover from the infinite boot loop), so if there is some active step that needs to be taken to enable suspend, then I had not done it.
> When was it?
This was within the past month. I see two possible reasons you didn't run into it:
1) You have been applying the updates as they come out, whereas I took a dusty phone that hadn't been turned on in years and ran the update.
2) You were already on crimson, so maybe they only broke byzantium (or whatever version it was on from years of sitting unused and then hitting update in the software center).
This is strange. See this post concerning the battery life: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/. Have you updated the modem firmware?
You are right, I have case 1). It is quite likely that Byzantium is (was) much less stable, as it required a lot of hacks and relied on a very old Debian version.
> Have you updated the modem firmware?
Nope, but I just looked it up and Purism's site states:
"These files are controlled by a third-party and are not publicly accessible. Contact Purism Support to request these files for a firmware update"
Yikes....
https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-d...
> Note: New devices XQ-CT62 (1Ⅳ US variant) and XQ-CQ62 (5Ⅳ US variant) do not support bootloader unlock.
https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-bootloader-and-root-guide-xpe...
https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...
[1]: Linus Torvalds argues that the FSF tried to "sneak in" an additional clause to prohibit hardware locking. Since Linux was originally licensed with an "or later version" variant of GPL v2, that would've created a situation where Linus could not merge other people's work into the kernel without relicensing the upstream project to GPL v3. To prevent this, he later explicitly relicensed the kernel as GPLv2-only. https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU
Bootloader unlocking should be a basic consumer right, and if Linux went GPLv3, it would be closer to reality.
If it should be a consumer right, why limit it only to devices certain types of software? Why not consumer protection law that applies to all devices? I think software licenses are the wrong tool for this problem.
There's a lot of crazy crayon licenses out there that try to fix the whole world by tacking on a whole lot of restrictions to their software licenses, prohibiting use for a long list of reasons... to me it sounds like a bunch of newspeak, as if "more restrictions = more freedom"
"Sure, you can have the sources, you just can't use them on your own devices because the vendor that shipped it has decided to bar you from doing that with a 2048-bit RSA key" just feels like GPL was upheld in letter, but not in spirit.
How would you feel if a piece of hardware came with a license prohibiting software developers from using encryption to secure their systems?
The root of the issue here is that phone hardware landscape is effectively a duopoly. It is an antitrust issue. Trying to use software licenses to do this 1) won't be effective because the duopoly will never use them, and 2) is like going around your ass to get to your elbow. Even if it did work it wouldn't get to the root of the issue. The law needs to fix the fact that almost all phones on the planet are controlled either directly or indirectly by two companies.
> controlled either directly or indirectly by two companies
While many manufacturers physically make Android phones they all functionally play by Google’s rules as a contractual condition to get proprietary gApps.
Amazon even tried to pull off an Android fork without gApps but failed.
The only third option is Huawei’s HarmonyOS if you live in China.
What Linus has contributed is already huge. We can't put all the burden of making the world right on him.
Would it be better if apple and google flipped the switch and made all future devices 100% closed sourced?
So, what would Linux being more open really have changed?
Snark aside, why are the entirely functional devices obsolete? It's because the growing demands of the endless software bloat, web bloat, feature bloat. New wireless technologies and better protocols, sure, but I've been using software for 35 years and the software contribution to this mess really gets me down.
Now, could hardware vendors tell Qualcomm to go pound sand and run their own support for old SoCs? Yes they could. Do they want to? Hell no, supporting old devices doesn't make any money.
Samsung & Pixel are now offering 7 years of updates for flagships, so it would seem it's no longer a hardware/support limitation and purely a financial decision by other android manufacturers, and by Samsung for their non S-series of phones.
TL;DR OEMs are deliberately choosing to not support their devices, not due to any limitations anymore (thanks to project treble).
Well... duh? Their program offers far less money for the old phone than selling it used on ebay. Why would anyone use it?
It sets the price floor and provides liquidity, so the phone doesn’t go into a trash bin instead.
How about good PR. This is what is problem with those big corporations: the only thing that matters is money.
Samsung owns SmartThings, a smart home platform. They could've come up with a suite of apps for turning your phone into a SmartThings-connected camera, or motion detector, or remote control, or button panel, or a dashboard, etc. Either charge a little for the apps, or trust that sucking people into the SmartThings ecosystem will cause them to buy hubs and other devices.
Users might be more willing to upgrade their phone if they can turn the old one into a baby monitor vs getting scammed on a trade-in or letting it sit in a drawer.
The real problem is the shortsightedness, where the top dogs only care about money coming in the next 3-12 months. Even this is more a reflection of the system that consistently produces companies which operate this way. Which is a reflection of..
They already got that good PR when they made those announcements.
Well, judging from the tone of your comment, you said this without a hint of irony or larger awareness, as if just chucking things in a hole, environment and everything be damned, was just sort of inevitable.
> It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.
Huh? Saving consumers money by reusing and repurposing perfectly good devices, save energy use, raw materials, distribution, and waste disposal and recycling of perfectly good devices. Those things save the economy and consumers money overall!
We get this not because of capitalism but because of growthism. We get this because big corporations gotta keep generating that profit, regardless of whether they have solved a problem or not. Gotta grow that market, gotta jack that stock.
But in reality capitalists get to choose the products and use advertising to brainwash us into wanting whatever shit they're shoveling.
Capitalism is supposed to optimise production for efficiency. In reality the people holding the principal capital use it to optimise for profit and we're largely impotent to do anything because they'll just lean more on the 'brainwash' aspect of profitability... Maybe go so far as to sway elections, to put in fascists so they can exercise larger handles of control... all to get a favorable tax regime when they've already got more money than they can spend.
Ho-hum.
I think there's a way out, through cooperatives, possibly, but it's a multi-generational path before you can really start to make change.
Good reminder that companies so large are never a good thing.
Now, if you ask me why there is a lack of competition of phone brands in the US, I have a TED talk to give...
Doubtful. I can't think of a company that clearly hates its users more than Microsoft or Meta.
I'd say it's the tech industry as a whole that's toxic. And long overdue for a reckoning.
Related anecdote: My old washing machine is about to die, and I was discussing this with a co-worker the other day. He told me, with much excitement, about his new washing machine with AI, and a smartphone app where he can program his own washing cycles. I... just don't feel like I belong on the same planet as this person. It's the polar opposite of what I want.
Do you happen to know what kind of performance you can expect? Or perhaps a better way?
Are phones any good for that? (I agree with the rest, and I'm a big fan of termux, I just wouldn't have thought of a phone - especially an old phone - as a useful way to run AI)
Of course, that would require today's phones to age out of "being used as a phone" bracket, and robotics VLAs to become actually useful. But things like the Comma AI autopilot hardware use slightly obsolete smartphone chips internally - so it's not like it's impossible to run a useful AI on this kind of HW.
I've seen this happen plenty where companies start campaigns for reasons and then ditch it as soon a they've achieved the thing from the list above.
Or when they announced that "Linux on Dex", for which they had been doing public beta testing on Note 9 phones, would only support the just-released Note 10. (And then they dropped the entire thing anyway).
These are phones for which the only difference between generations may be a couple mAh in the battery. Yet they still use software to gate features.
On the negative side, it would probably have a minor impact on the number of new phones sold if old ones were able to be "refurbished" in this way. Again, probably not significant, but if it's even a penny cash flow negative, why invest their resources in it?
Overall the only significant gain to be made is the announcement because it can be spun and quoted to the average consumer as Samsung being more eco-friendly. It's akin to enabling consumerism, and consumers generally don't go to check if companies were telling the truth about this stuff.
Did we accidentally time travel again?