Because this topic came up in c/technology and I was wondering.
Would this be feasible? How bad would it be to your social life?
I’m looking for these scenarios:
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No smartphone, but have a dumbphone and a computer
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No phone at all, but have a computer
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No smartphone, but have a dumbphone, no computer
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Nothing at all
it’s not even about a smartphone, it’s about being allowed to access services with said smartphone.
when the ticket machine was removed from a train station in rural sweden and replaced with a note on how to buy tickets online, it instantly locked three types of people out: people who don’t have a smartphone, people who don’t have a payment card, and tourists. because it required online verification, you basically needed a swedish phone number and id to buy tickets.
this was about eight years ago, so smartphone penetration was lower, but i still think about the people i met at the train station while i desperately tried to order tickets over the phone and kept getting stuck in their automated phone tree. they were basically stuck there.
Why would they lock out tourists from public transport?
it wasn’t intentional. they just didn’t think about how to implement it. took them four or five years to fix.
A friend of mine avoids smartphones as he is (rightfully) very concerned with his privacy when it comes to big tech. So he has a PC and a dumbphone.
My mother in law gets by just fine without hers. But then again, she’s in Arkansas, so I’m not sure if that counts as a modern, or developed country.
I live in Germany. For the moment, i do not require a phone for anything in my life. I use it as an nfc card reader for my ID, but there are usb readers that could replace that. All other things also would continue working without a phone. Email, matrix, osm, music all work on a laptop. I actually have this orangpi + powerbank + usbc touchscreen setup that works basically like a laptop. I could add a sim card module to it too.
“Nothing at all” would mean not being well informed about politics and i think that has moral implications i could not live with. I think “computer only + time limit” is a good idea.
Can I ask what is the advantage of the orangpi/powerbank/touchscreen compared to regular laptop ?
I gotta admit reason No. 1 is “because why not”. It was a fun project that i learned lots from.
2 is modularity. If i want to be able to easily upgrade or modify the fundamental parts of the system, this makes it super easy. Even with a 2000€ framework which is the king of modularity, you cant just get a completely different display or a battery twice the size.
3 is price. This whole setup cost me like 300-350€ which is a good price even if you bought a used laptop.
I havent actually looked at the battery life of other devices so idk how it compares. Without the screen this bundle has ~40-50h battery life. With the screen its around 8-10h which is more than enough imo. For like 40€ i could buy a powerbank twice the size and double that.
Weight is also pretty good with around 1.4kg for everything. The screen is a metal frame one that weight 1kg but there are also plastic frame ones that weight 500g which would get it to 900g in total. If i add a wireless keyboard and mouse then its gets a bit heavier again of course.
The biggest downside at the moment with this kind of thing is firmware/OS support. The orangpi support is not amazing. Using a custom OS called ubuntu-rockchip its working pretty well overall and has things like hardware acceleration working so it runs most normal applications just fine, but suspend is not working for example. Watching videos is basically the most intensive thing you can still do on this thing, but all the basic stuff works fine.
