Comment by gspr

These people. I don't have words.

I'm getting ready to give up on smartphones altogether. I used to think that surely a sufficiently open phone would come along, and that you could then just run a sandboxed Android emulator on that for whenever you needed some proprietary apps where society has stupidly decided you need them. But that also seems to be getting progressively harder.

So maybe I just give up on actually using a phone for much. Has anyone tried living with cheap Android or iPhone as a source of connectivity and making phone calls, perhaps with the odd app you just can't get through daily life without (see above), and then move everything where privacy and control actually matter the most to a small "pocket computer" that connects to the internet through a connection shared by the cheap phone? Are there any sufficiently compact and nice such devices? Surely they're easier to produce when you don't require a phone baseband and all the things that are needed for Google to certify it as an Android phone?

Thoughts?