Sidephone: A minimalist Android phone with swappable USB keypads | Hacker News Reader

Sidephone: A minimalist Android phone with swappable USB keypads

sidephone.com

38 pointsphantomathkg22 comments

MT8766 (low-end 2020) and Android 12 (2021)

https://docs.sidephone.com/en/articles/13624506-specificatio...

Oh cool, Mediatek. So it comes pre-exploited and vulnerable out of the box, awesome!

Can someone explain the appeal of the swappable keypad? I really see no advantage in having this. Just seems like extra engineering for no real reason.

Upgradeability and ease of repair.

I can imagine a BlackBerry-style keyboard showing up at some point, or maybe even something that isn't a keyboard (ex: a mini arcade joystick + buttons for games)?

They have an iPod wheel/button for it in their site.

It'd probably be useless for phone control, but I'd love a flac player with old iPod controls.

W.r.t. repairs I don't think physical keypads have been the main source of difficult or costly repairs. You can easily make a keypad repairable or replaceable without this gimmicky swappable keypad.

W.r.t. other style keypads, that's a big "if" they exist. Oftentimes unless there's a huge popularity of a product, those pie-in-the-sky future additions never get made or see the light of day. Hope they do for the people that want it, but I wouldn't hold my breath for how niche this product is.

I'd love to try these new phones. My current phone (Google Fold) is terrible. However

1. google pixels are the best android devices AFAICT. Not a high bar, but that's that.

2. due to the prevalence of spam and scam calls: Not having an AI call filtering is a no-go. google pixel's have a really nice call screen.

Course we could have a competent government that would do something about scams (besides encouraging and supporting them). Then small business could actually compete. But the best we get is a rapist and scam artist.

Speaking of,

wonder how things are going with the Clicks keyboard and Communicator.

https://www.clicks.tech/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46467057)

Weird that the keyboard is removable but the battery isn't. Such a missed opportunity to make it more appealing to those who care about repairability.

Looks like it is

https://docs.sidephone.com/en/articles/13656688-replace-the-...

Easy repairability is good too. (I was going by their own "Specifications" that said battery is "non-removable" - https://archive.md/Ngoxu ). I would buy this phone if my banking app is able to run on it.

Not having support for messaging apps is a bit much considering it's still Android based. Why is it WIP? What's the P to W? Play services?

Apps:

- Whatsapp

- Proton VPN, Drive, Mail

- Signal

- Obtainium

- Uber

- Podcast player

- etc

Yes but why are they WIP? On a regular Android phone you just install them.

None of the apps listed by GP are identified as works in progress.

This is the full list of WIP apps, from the website.

- Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal.

- Telegram, Messenger, Threema, WeChat and more.

- DUO, Aegis, and BitWarden.

They mention in several places that the phone is degoogled and that certain apps won't work due to lack of Play services. They also probably can't redistribute popular messaging apps without a special agreement with the developer, or risking it with Aurora Store or similar. Unfortunately Google is leading a fight to close Android that so far no big entity is really resisting anymore (Epic now having settled their lawsuit and agreeing to never badmouth Android again), with efforts such as Play Integrity API, automatic protection that they're pushing developers to activate, etc. Unless something changes, in the near future "it's Android" won't mean much for app compatibility...

Seems we all need to actively invest into forking Android or creating a separate mobile OS from scratch. Google will try for sure to boil us all slowly from open Android to the very much closed ios-like state of their OS.

They support WhatsApp and Signal, according to the website.

"Telegram, Messenger, Threema, WeChat and more" are marked as WIP.

Or I can just use my cellular Apple Watch (like I do now) for my “side phone”…

Then do just that :)

Am I really the only one that sees this for the waste of time, money, and intelligence it took to create...?

another useless digital minimalism gimmick

> Android

DOA. We need more feature phones running custom firmware. Or Linux phones. What Jolla is doing with Sailfish is nice.

Stop leaning on Android. It's unnecessary baggage. Divest.

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