[GLLUG] adroid alternative

[James Dutton]

Hi,

Another alternative is the fact that all Android phones run a Linux
kernel under them.
Some, not all, Android phones let you install your own Linux kernel.
E.g. CyanogenMod
So, if you really wanted to, you could experiment yourself, with your
own kernel, and whatever GUI you wished on a wide variety of mobile
phones.
It is not limited to pinephones.
Unfortunately not the same is available for the baseband part of the
SOC. The baseband is the RF bit that talks to the cell phone masts.
If someone could come up with some open source baseband code, things
would be excellent.
It should be noted that even the pinephone has a binary only baseband code.
It is also quite expensive to do development on baseband, because one
needs expensive spectrum analysers etc. to test them.

A mobile phone has two parts:
1) Baseband RF code for phone calls, bluetooth and wifi.
2) Application CPU code - the bit that runs android.
So, even if one is using open source for (2), one still needs to
reverse engineer the API to (1) in order to make phone calls, and
internet, wifi etc. Anything RF related.
Each phone tends to do the API for (1) differently, so this is why
making phone calls on a open source phone is difficult to get working
most of the time. There are just so many variations of (1)

Kind Regards

James