repurposing old Android cell phones using Mobian?
I'm intrigued by the possibility of repurposing old Android cell phones as economical, blind-accessible portable computers. The Good News is that there are billions of these devices out there, often available for very little money.
The Bad News is that the development efforts are quite fragmented, using various Linux flavors (e.g., Alpine, Android, Arch, Debian) as their starting points. Also, none of the projects seem to have accessibility as a goal.
Given that the Mobian effort is based on Debian (and plans to upstream their patches whenever possible), it seems like some folks on this list might be interested in working with them to improve its accessibility.
Details
At the moment, the Golden Path for most of these cell phone development efforts seems to involve the PinePhone. This is an open source hardware development project, produced by the Pine64 folks. A number of projects (including Mobian) have settled on it as their base platform.
Pine64 recently announced a version of the PinePhone which comes pre-installed with postmarketOS, but which (via a microSD card) can run Mobian. I've ordered one of these and hope to be playing with it soon.
Here are some relevant links:
- https://mobian-project.org
- https://www.pine64.org/pinephone
- https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/15/july-updatepmos-ce-pre-orders-and-new-pinephone-version
- https://store.pine64.org/product/pinephone-community-edition-postmarketos-with-convergence-package-limited-edition-linux-smartphone
-r
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