On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:59 PM, GtwoG PublicOhOne <g2g-public01@att.net> wrote:

Re. Pete & Jeremy-

Kickstarter:

Hardware development can be expensive, so any Kickstarter campaign for
this is going to have to be well-planned as to cost (and then double it
from the estimate) and timeline (ditto, double it). And it's going to
have to anticipate interference from carriers and surveillance
interests. OTOH, with everyone tweaked about NSA, if there was ever a
time for this, now's the time.

Agreed on all points.

$150 of fragile electronics is better than $500 of fragile electronics.
BTW, Alcatel owns some part of AT&T, possibly what was left of the
manufacturing arm, that was once known as Western Electric, maker of
near-indestructible telephones.

Hah, interesting. The review so far: the screen is noticeably lower visual quality than my One S, but it has yet to bother me. It's a little less responsive as a touch screen too, which seems more likely to annoy down the road. The screen *feels* like a synthetic of some kind, haven't looked it up yet; I figure this means it's less likely to smash than glass (awesome!!) and more likely to smudge (meh, maybe I'll grab some screen protectors). And I actually like the simple, "cheap" feel -- a continual reminder that I'm being a little less excessive. Haven't put the camera through the paces yet. I also read it doesn't have LTE, which is one of the benefits of TMobile service…so I'll do a speedtest with tethering when I'm in a suitable location. Speaking of, the connectivity has always been bad in my apartment, but is almost non-existent with this phone. But since this phone has built-in wifi calling, I don't think that will be a practical problem for me.

In other words: so far so good!

<snip>

Other:

Dirty Little Secrets Department: Skype over a mobile is almost as good
as landline audio. Skype is just proprietary VOIP (with surveillance of
course) so there's no good reason one couldn't develop a Skype-like app
with built-in voice crypto and landline-grade audio, that would use the
data connection to get the bandwidth it needs.

I've recently been experimenting with Jitsi on my laptop. It seems buggy and sometimes simply doesn't work, or won't allow me to find my contacts; but when it *does* work, the sound quality is excellent. I'm told that' partially because it's true peer-to-peer, which Skype no longer is. Any experience with, or thoughts about, this free software?

Something else that's needed: An anonymizer website that people can use
to access things such as Google Maps without Google surveillance. Ideal
case: the server constantly generates address-pair requests more or less
at random, so your search for the local Circle-A Cafe doesn't stick
out. Encrypted link between user and server; user's request goes into
queue with the random requests, and gets a reply in a minute or less.
Then a local app on the mobile device takes the data and provides actual
directions, rather than relaying the "turn-by-turn" stuff through Google.

Additionally, it seems like the scheme you describe (decisions on the local device) would be better in areas without connectivity. Input the locations, hop in the car, put phone in airplane mode to conserve battery..

Lastly: Bush's former FCC Chairman is now a lobbyist for the carrier
industry, and was just recently advocating for data caps, saying "it's
not too late for caps." (High bandwidth + data caps = boobytrap for
high monthly bills.) One more battle front to fight...

Interesting, did data caps get outlawed somewhere in there? I (perhaps naively) was assuming that the carriers were responding to market demand when they lifted those...

-G.

=====

Pete wrote:

G! I love this annotated feature list, and would gladly jump into a
Kickstarter campaign to produce one. I'm sure I can't be the only one.

Thank you, to you and the others who have repled to my request. Today I
bought, for $150, a Alcatel Fierce, brand new, which seems to be a
pretty decent phone with a mediocre screen and a mediocre camera. I
believe I will be happy with it (all things considered) and am happier
with $150 of liability in my pocket every day than $500.

I will also order the repair kit for the One S, and hope I can get it
back up and running.

Pete

Jeremy wrote:
> = And last but not least, default to G.711 audio for voice calls.
>
> Just curious. Why G.711 instead of opus?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Opus_bitrate%2Blatency_comparison.svg
>
> Jeremy