Never stop dreaming!

That's a keypad. Orders of magnitude simpler than what Neo900 team is doing.


Joerg, Have you considered collaborating with Purism? IIRC they're interested in making a privacy-oriented phone.

Purism is a joke.

Yes, it was a joke.

I am not a backer (Because I am poor, so pre-order a device which has the chance to not to ship seemed not a wise decision to me), but I am still using my N900 day by day, and I do hope the Neo900 project to succeed and I want to get one if it came out.... even I don't have much confidence in this project now.

When the Neo900 project was first announced, I thought it was a reasonable upgrade to N900. The specification was not superb, but even if Neo900 cannot do the much different things than N900, at least it was likely to do the same things faster than N900 - so why not?

But now we have almost 4 years passed. If the Neo900 will be able to ship this year, it may still be "a reasonable upgrade". But if it needs more years to make it into production, say, 2 or 3 more years. It will more like the pricey nostalgia for N900 rather than a reasonable upgrade.

I understand that the project wants to make the working prototype before the Kickstarter campaign, to attract more people to fund. But I am afraid the best period to attract people was already passed. The promised product seems more outdated than before, and the people who really like to support this project were already given their money, besides them, there is not much people left.

I really want to have a spiritual successor to N900, and Neo900 was the first project seemed promising. But now I think that maybe to make a spiritual successor to Maemo OS to run on the Android-compatible device, or even make a completely new N900-like device, will see the more bright future than Neo900. Making a board to fit into the N900 case is definitely a great idea, but now it seems too late and too costly, and when it finally came out, not many people will really need it anymore.

This is one of my concerns too, since the success of the whole project probably depends a lot on the success of the future Kickstarter campaign.

Please, elaborate.

Selling computers that respect your privacy and run on generic hardware + magic kill switches, that somehow fix, the privacy issues that their closed source hardware brings, is a joke.
(For example: You can read a lot about the shady low-level stuff, intel implemented in it's (newer) CPUs, on the web.)

I dare to assert, that an old IBM Thinkpad (running libreboot), respects your privacy more, than Purism's overpriced toys....altough this solution still isnt perfect.

Actually, this is way too overhyped.
AFAIK the "backdoor" in those Intel processors is usually disabled by most laptop manufacturers on most commercial laptops.

Well, I kinda agree. As i said, even an old Thinkpad isnt perfect.

But then its absolutely uncertain, if the laptop manufacturers can deactivate it completely.
And what if there are more backdoors? After Ed. Snow. you should know that everything theoretically possibe to break ones privacy, will get used or is getting used.
And Intel, being an american company, has to grant the gov access to their backdoors, by law.

I probably sound very paranoid right now. And you wouldn't be in the wrong of you'd tell me to throw away all of my electronic devices and never use the Internet again, because the stuff i wrote here, the mindset it projects, isn't compatible with them and the internet...But well, nowadays you cant give up all this stuff.
And even of you cant trust your hw, at least, you can try your best to choose the most trustworthy hw and sw.

Says me, a person who owns several highly untrustworthy devices.

I kinda feel, that I moved away from the original topic.