@matt@ruari If only the software was free and open source… hmm, I wonder what happened there. Couldn’t possibly be an issue with liberal open source licenses working exactly as designed, eh, Mozilla?
@ruari Yess! What I don't understand about feature phones is that people say the phones released today are WORSE than the ones that we had back in 2004.
I don't get how they can be worse. 🙉 Especially when they say predictive text is broken (I see that comment a lot).
Here's me wondering whether it was always bad on feature phones, our expectations changed but the tech didn't. Or, whether it has actually gotten worse.
Anyway, this past month I've been dreaming of making my own feature phone.
@matt If you found the MP01 buggy… you will be dissapointed in the MP02. The predictive text is a fucking nightmare. I logged a bunch of bugs to them but I don not think they go me at all. It would be unusuable for Signal/Pigeon I reckon because of how hard it was to type.
Also the sound quality on my unit was attrocious (maybe I just have a hardware fault 🤷)
@ruari I had a MP01 for a few years and even used it for about 6 months straight.
MP02 looks slightly better in the software department; it at least has Signal integration (they call it Pigeon). But I am sure it's still super buggy.
I agree that MP01 was a let-down. I can't talk for MP02 because I haven't used it. Their new project MC02 seems odd; they have gone into smartphone territory.
I was also given by them as an early external tester/enthusiast and MP02 before it went live by the founder Petter Neby. I once met up with him in Oslo for a chat (he is Norwegian but no longer lives here).
I hate to say it but that phone was so fucking buggy I could not deal with it. It killed my interest in Punkt. I should probably start it up again and try updating it, maybe they fixed things but it was such a let down at the time.
I think it would be very interesting to have a feature phone device that was running a nice OS; one that could integrate useful messaging apps - so you can still chat to friends using Signal + WhatsApp, that encrypted the data on the device, that could sync your contacts or calendar with other services...
Punkt's MP02 started to do this, but it seems they shifted focus to making a smartphone based on Apostrophy OS.
To be honest, I think I would like owning the hardware, but could not deal with the software.
There seem to be a few companies making "feature phones" again for various reasons, but none of them are investing in the software.
KaiOS, running on some Nokia devices, is very very slow for the hardware. Nokia's S30+ operating system is dated and very crap. Other feature phones on the market seem to use Android or another bad proprietary OS.