[sudo-discuss] Broke fancy smart phone, arg.

[GtwoG PublicOhOne]

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.

$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. 

Opus: 

I hadn't run across this one before, but it appears to be a
variable-bandwidth transmission algorithm.  If that's the case, then the
upside is that it lets you download data in the middle of a phone call,
but the downside is that it lets adware, spyware, and bloatware do
likewise. 

So my inclination is to give the end-user deliberate control over
bandwidth allocation, such as by clicking something to allow a bandwidth
shift.  Thus you could e.g. check out a link a friend sent you without
letting adware/spyware hog your bandwidth.

G.711 is landline-grade audio.  Even better is HD (high-def) audio
(Panasonic and a few others, starting with landline VOIP), so phone
calls will sound as good as FM radio (and as good as what the snoops get
when they activate your mic when you aren't looking).  HD audio and
reliable connections would mean the end of "I don't like talking on the
phone (because crap audio and drop-outs are so damn frustrating)."

If Opus can do HD and can be configured as user-controllable, it should
be a selectable option.  Give users a choice of voice algorithms, and
built-in crypto while we're at it.

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.

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. 

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...

-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