This may say more about us than the current state of the telephone network, but unless your Grandma is still kicking, how many phone calls do you take that are actually worth picking up? Around here it’s one variety of scam or another, with the odd cold-calling salesperson to round it out.
So when we saw [Bolan Xu]’s texting-only TERMINUS cell phone project, it took but a minute to decide that, yeah, we wouldn’t miss the telephone part of the phone very much either.
The trade-offs are immense when compared to your smartphone; there’s no voice, no web browser, no social media, and no camera. But on the flip side there’s also no spyware and no annoying spam calls. Besides, he’s built a QWERTY keyboard onto this thing, and that does seem to be what most of us miss in this era of black rectangles.
In terms of electronics, its rocking a tiny OLED display for you to read your messages on, driven by an ESP8266. When WiFi is available the plan was to bridge over the internet in an SMS version of VOIP, but [Bolan Xu] ended up installing a cellular modem in it anyway.
As you can tell from the skeletal case, this is very much a prototype, but it is a promising project. We’ve seen ESP-based phones before, but they tend to be a bit smarter, and run on ESP32 instead of the more modest ESP8266.
In order of usage, my telephone is
1) An app store with “mandatory” apps like banking, transport/travel, health and verification
2) Communications device with SMS and telephony, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp
I do use telephony/voice chat/video chat quite a lot because I work in an international organisation, I have friends world-wide and because it is easier to hold a conversation talking than writing
Funny.
I would never use an insecure, easily-lost device like a phone for banking or health or verification.
It’s just a communications & messaging device.
Banks prefer phone apps for banking (especially on iphone) because they are way more secure than banking used to be on your (ok, Windows) computer.
For some definitions of “secure”, perhaps.
The “mandatory” part in quotes was actually an indication that I’d rather not use the phone for these purposes but it seems unavoidable unless I want a stunted service or no service at all.
It is a sad state of affairs that banks (and some public services) rely so much on phone apps (apps that only work on iOS or Android, at that, preventing me from installing a more open OS on my phone) that some snub the web-based services and only provide minimal functionality on them.
And at least one airline no longer accepts anything but their app for boarding, so not even the possibility to print your boarding card any more.
I don’t know where you live, but I live in the UK, and my GP only accepts prescription requests via a phone app. Grrrrrrr!!!
Yup, I’d rather not use my phone for these purposes, but unless I want to live in the stone age (OK, maybe more like early post-Victorian age) I have to suck it up. I do have a “travel” phone without all the crud I don’t need when not in the UK to minimise the risk.
PS: Not really related to the comment as such — What does the “Email me new comments” available when commenting do? It seems that no matter whether it is black-dot-left-on-white (presumably meaning don’t send emails) or white-dot-right-on-blue (possibly meaning send me relevant emails) I get the same number of mails, a nice, big, round zero 🤷🏼‍♂️
Then this project is not for you.
Funny 2. At work I consider our internal chat better for conversation than voice calls on teams (or whatever the current thing is). Voice calls are even worse because I have to use one hand to hold the phone. I have to admit that I use the chat on a computer with a full keyboard. It might be different if I was constantly on a mobile device.
For handsfree voice calls there are these handy accessories that you put in your ear. For chat (or whatever) on your phone without typing, speech to text is fast and remarkably good these days
I work in an international company that is based around Linux/Kubernetes operations and uses OSS products only, internally. It is a bit of a problem sometimes, as many of our customers are Microsoft devotees with Linux servers stuffed away where they can’t see them, which means I have to use Teams for meetings. And only if I am out and about without a computer/laptop on the ready do I use a phone for that sort of meetings
it’s nice to see people still finding uses for the ESP8266, my favorite microcontroller. i keep learning new things about it. did you know it has a tiny bit of RAM memory that survives restart? unfortunately, it does not survive reflashing, so my attempts to preserve bits of state through that have to rely on a LittleFS file system instead.
If the goal is to avoid spam you probably want a contact whitelist at this point. Even SMS is full of it if you have an old phone number.
I miss living in a high trust society when if the phone rang it meant someone actually needed to talk to a member of the household.
.. that was supposed to be top level. Sorry, Gus. That’s cool to know about the 8266, though.
that (3d-printed) case gives me all of the feelings 🙂
I don’t see a case; I see a frame which gives me the feeling that it would be painful to use and fragile.
yeah that’s one of the feelings but a vague familiarity with the frustration that created it is another one 🙂
Regarding the thumb keyboard: is Cherry or anybody working on scaling down mechanical keyboard switches to the size of these little tact switches for this kind of application? Maybe the materials don’t exist (or are too costly) for this to be feasible.
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