yeah the website says a whole bunch of nothing imo & doesnt really define a problem needing to be solved, perhaps they've struck a deal with phone carrier's to get unsold phones that are destined for the landfill as they have a t-mobile logo on their site, thats the only business aspect I can imagine get 10s of million worth of components for like a 1/10 of the price etc
google is telling me around 400k phone like devices are thrown out into landfills everyday, there might be a market to bring down costs eventually if they get logistics properly moving
I think this proving out the concept. A dev board costing. 150 doesn't matter for professional projects. It latters for tinkerers. What matters is unit price for desired qty.
And this has 4G/LTE (because it is a smartphone) so comparisons to base RPis are largely irrelevant.
And in industrial embedded Linux stuff there is essentially no correlation between price and performance. Most don't need performance and they aren't really cost-optimizing this bit of the production line very hard. It just needs to be certifiable, reliable and replacable.
I do hope they come down a lot in price and prove this out over many more phone variants.
> It just needs to be certifiable, reliable and replacable.
I think those are some good unanswered questions here. The supply of used phones is pretty cyclical, and almost all of them are out of production when their supply peaks.
Also pretty much all smartphones rely heavily on components without data sheets and with proprietary firmware blobs that won't be updated or patched without first-party support, or at all.
> And this has 4G/LTE (because it is a smartphone) so comparisons to base RPis are largely irrelevant.
Yes? So have countless new phones at around 150€. Including screen, battery, case, and warranty.
Edit: Just for fun, a list from a german shopping/comparison site, aptly named 'scrooge', selected for LTE, at least 2GB RAM, Octacore, Android 15 to not get too old stuff, in stock, 4 days delivery max, capped at 150€ incl. delivery. Sorted for lowest price first:
Editoftheedit: To stay with the terminology of the 'largely irrelevant base RPI', they've built (or intend to?) a base board for whatever they are using as CM/Computemodule to plug into. I see some GPIO, some USB, one Ethernet.
A little bit of board layout, soldering of mostly passive components, and that's it.
google is telling me around 400k phone like devices are thrown out into landfills everyday, there might be a market to bring down costs eventually if they get logistics properly moving