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jokoonyesterday at 12:38 PM4 repliesview on HN

I don't even know what would be the point of such device, and if there really is a market for it for tech companies. I would say yes?

As a consumer, all I want if a very minimal "phone", with wifi, touch screen, battery, but no 4g or mobile networking, and linux on it. Just the cheapest, smallest, wifi, battery-powered, touchscreen LCD device that could exist that can run executables.

People are going to say "but just buy a cheap phone", but I cannot really run custom software on those, I can't expect to install a custom system image, and generally even cheap phones CPU SOC are way way too powerful. Open source phones are generally crazy expensive and very powerful, and I am not going to buy those.

With the range of hardware that exist out there, I think such device could cost about 60 euros, and it would be more interesting than a RPI.

The RPI is an amazing product, but it lacks an all integrated consumer device with an actual screen and battery. Of course I can already build one with a compute module etc, but it's not really portable and not designed around a flat battery.


Replies

numpad0yesterday at 3:36 PM

> I think such device could cost about 60 euros

Making a thing made, shipped and delivered at 60 euros each on credit cards is HARD. 600 is easier. 60m consider it done. I wouldn't want to even make and sell, idk, a lens cap for a camera, at that price, without first owning couple factories running at healthy levels of utilization. Maaaaybe if my customers would be happy with a 3D printed artisanal version of it. But even then it'll technically be delivered at a slight loss.

bee_rideryesterday at 1:33 PM

They don’t make cellphones, they make little computers. Hypothetically you could probably use an Arduino or an esp32 to make a cellphone, but you wouldn’t say those organizations lack an all-integrated consumer device, right? They just aren’t in that business.

tecleandoryesterday at 1:10 PM

First, note that what's on that article is not an Raspberry Pi, it's a Raspberry Pi Pico.

I'm not sure about what you want. You don't want a phone, so you want... A tablet, maybe? Or a Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 with a touch screen? Do you want a small screen? Big? Keyboard/Keypad? Touch only?

mghackerladyyesterday at 1:59 PM

You can buy touchscreen enclosures for the various pi models. If you want to put in the effort to make your own PCB you could really slim it down by using a pi compute module