It’s so strange that out of the box CalDAV and CardDAV support is rare for mobile devices. iPhones are the best somehow, with Android being heavily Google-focused and support is totally absent on non-smart platforms, which is the perfect opposite of what one might expect! It’d make way more sense if the more open platforms were built around open standards, but somehow here we are.

I am not 100% sure but my partner has the nokia “bannana” phone and i think it supports both. It for sure supports 4g hotspot and caldav but i think even carddav.

Kinda sad that it's KaiOS the FirefoxOS fork. One can only wonder what would have happened if Mozilla kept with the project till now. There is huge wave of people wanting less absorbing devices nowdays.

There was a multiple years of gap between rollout of voice call specification on LTE(VoLTE) and launches of first featurephone operating system supporting it. Android and iOS were only implementation available for a while. For this reason, practically all "featurephone" style phones that supports voice call, except very few, runs AOSP. At the point where your product runs AOSP, you might as well launch it as a low end smartphone, which is what a lot of vendor do.

I suspect the solution may be a compact tablet running a touch-friendly Linux distro, and the "phone" is just a mobile hotspot. If you want some fantastic camera built in, that's a separate problem.

I've been more neutral about this in the past, but the current and future integration of LLMs (and other ML models) into the base operating system will mean these mobile phones do less of what the user wants and more of what the user does not want.

Secondly, Apple is in the process of becoming an adtech company and will not provide an alternative to Google.

Thirdly, Google may be forced to divest Android and the mobile business. If so, the buyer is likely to be as bad, or worse, because they'll have to figure out how to pay for the whole thing.

For a couple years I used the TCL Flip as a phone and mobile hotspot for my iPod touch. I'm pretty sure KaiOS supports CardDAV.

> Presents a mobile hotspot

I guess you can get a mobile hotspot and a dumb phone separately. Looks like 5G Wifi 6 APs are available for ~$100.

The dipshits at Apple and Google don't provide what should be a built in feature (recording calls) and make it difficult to add it through third party software. At this point, iOS and Android are actively working against the user.

I don’t really care to do any task traditionally associated with full fat computers directly on my phone, simply because the input methods are extremely poor for that kind of thing. If my phone could act like an ultrabook/netbook when hooked up to a screen and proper desktop input on the other hand (similar to DeX, iPadOS 26, and the forthcoming baseline Android desktop mode), that’s a more interesting proposition and probably one that a number of more typical users would find interesting too.

For example, university students whose main use for a computer is editing documents could comfortably get by with nothing but a nice-ish phone, a monitor, and a Bluetooth KB+mouse.

> what unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone?

I do most of my light/routine server management via SSH from my phone, plus keeping a version control checkout of my documents that I do actually work on in vim (yes, the limited keyboard is annoying but it's fine for light work). At a previous job, the former extended quite far; I could get paged in the middle of the night, connect to the VPN, SSH into the server, triage, and frequently diagnose and even fix the problem without having to actually get out of bed.

I've rebuilt Linux servers with my phone from multiple countries over. I've also reconfigured BGP speaking routers with it.

> unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone

They're more powerful than plenty of computers from not too long ago

If you interpret “this space” a little more broadly, there are boutique manufacturers catering to hackers that sell tiny, cheap, wearable computers. Check out all the stuff Adafruit sells.

No CardDAV sync. How do you get contacts on and off the device?

Do you actually carry around a Linux laptop with a USB modem instead of a smartphone? Can you blog about it?

This.

Apple stopped selling all iPod hardware, including iPod touch, for a reason.

This isn't going to happen.

You won't have modern mobile banking or cellular communications in a device without binary blobs or "trusted" compute modules you cannot inspect.

This.

It's time for an antitrust breakup of Google (and Apple).

These two companies control mobile computing like a dictatorship. This is a sector where most people do all of their computing. This isn't gaming or a plaything - it's most people's lives and trillions of dollars of business activity. All gatekept by two companies.

Here's what needs to happen:

1. We need government mandated web installs of native apps without scare walls ("this app is dangerous and may delete your files") and enabled by default without labyrinthine settings to enable.

2. We need the ability to do payments and user signups without Google or Apple's platform pieces. We should not be forced to lock ourselves into their ecosystems.

3. Google search and Chrome cannot be the defaults on mobile platforms. We need the EU-mandated browser / search picker.

4. First party applications should not be treated as first class while third parties are left to dry. Google and Apple should not be allowed to install their platform components by default - a user must seek them out.

5. No more green text / blue text bubbles. All messaging must be multi-platform and equivalent with no favoritism.

6. Google and Apple wallets should not be the defaults, but rather the user should have the ability to configure their bank, PayPal, Cash App, or whatever payment provider they choose.

There are options out there for you to do this. Hell, build your own. That’s what nerds did long ago. Keep up the same effort today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> When was the last time anyone actually used their "mobile phone" for actual real phone calls

I called my mom yesterday (to her landline), and then I sent a text message to my friend from a parking lot to let them know I'd be there soon.

99% of my communications are SMS/MMS and while i do avoid phone calls my friend called me yesterday, and i called a business to ask about their holiday hours this weekend.

And it's all LTE, your pocket computer needs a network whether you use SMS or some IP messenger. Therefore carriers get involved, and they make horrifying demands of users and manufacturers.

But yeah, i don't want a phone, i want a pocket computer with VoLTE