Time for a new thread of it own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethering

Some of us may
have given up almost completely on the idea of
any kind of resurrection of n900.
( a quasi-legitimate debian handphone which:

1. is not Locked down inside a walled-garden of no-can-do
and/or
2. does not go spewing every jiggle of information over the internet.)


What is the best we can do for tethering tablets,
now that linux tablets are actually doable
to some extent ?


I did use an Android but the battery now resembles
what my grandma's feather bed looked like in the springtime,
so I guess I need to go buy a new better model.

I abandoned all faith in Ubuntu Touch
when I discovered it was simply Ubuntu lipstick
smeared onto the snout of an Android Pig

(a Boar with teats, no less).
I began using it as a tether for my ACER w4 running AntiX MX16
which is a wonderful solution to my Baytrail woes.
I am hoping to find another better tablet in the near future.
Until then I still want to tether my tablet with something better
than this Aquaris E5 which is now beginning to have issues also.

I am inclined toward an ASUS Zenphone 3
(I have had good fortune with ASUS, mostly)

But my question to everyone is:

Does anyone have good recommendations for a tether phone?

It needs to have strong battery and good comms
(no Broadcom toilet-bowl scum scrapings).

CPU and memory are not critical, it will not be doing anything
aside from SMS phone calls and an occasional gps read
or whatever. No critical life info on the device,
no social media games or other stuff.
It will be just a disposable internet hack for whatever tablety things
I might manage to get running "debians" on.


What do you recommend?

Thank you

I'm using Jolla sbj1, mainly for the reason that it works
Tethering usually via wlan hotspot, sometimes via USB if I work with a laptop.
Have tried also BT tethering just for laughs but it is fairly limited in bandwidth.

Seconded. It is a hassle since Jolla is not as good for a primary phone as the N900 is, so I use N900 daily and move my SIM card back to the Jolla only when I need a portable hotspot, which luckily is only once in a blue moon.

Have you tried one of the dedicated devices?

My parents have that kind of solution at their home, however it is just 3G (an older Huawei box) and the network is pretty bad at their location which is on deep and far countryside.

Maybe it's the age of the box or the spurious net, but the thing has to be booted once a week as it becomes unresponsive.

I use my N900 as a bluetooth hotspot, there are instructions on TMO on how-to. I am thinking of getting a tablet with Intel Cherry Trail so I can do x86/AMD64 like standard Debian stuff including even some use of wine win32/64 stuff as required. The only serious issue is building a kernel with driver support for Cherry Trail sound, wifi, and bt drivers; no idea on things like NFC, compass, and accelerometers.

At the shop now,
Discovered Asus zenphone 3 max is MediaTek

Now looking at Redmi 4x which touts strong battery

I have good experience with different cheap dedicated devices so if i would need (semi) permanent tethering i would spend the 30-50€ for one of those.
Especially batterylife is very good on modells that sport ~5Ah powerbanks compared to mobilephone solutions.
Best one i tried was TP-Link M5360. ~50€

I had a dedicated unit but
in order to reload the credits yet another device is required.

with a phone you can bootstrap via sms or via network.

more study needed on my part, certainly

Just like my Jolla

From China there are some pretty cool powerbank waterproof military tough looking phones. They have bluetooth and might do tethering but only have 2g. Wish that we saw more 3g stuff out of china but the 2g solutions are super cheap so they end up in the most creative phones.