Supposedly they’re offering a refund up until it ships if you want. It’s not a completely brand new company so it doesn’t seem super risky. I do it with a credit card that way you can do a chargeback if things go really bad.

What the other person said is true, I have a second old phone that I installed Ubuntu on. It’s really limited which phone support it though good chance you don’t have one.

Banking apps are going to check what is called “play integrity API” which checks if the device is secure locked, and not rooted. The app which allows you to use Android apps on Ubuntu touch is called Waydroid. It basically runs a full Android phone in a virtual machine. I very, very much doubt banking apps will like it. A lot of them will not run on a rooted Android phone for this reason.

Other apps will work fine. A little slow, plus it’s a real battery hog to emulate the whole Android system. So if I was really trying to daily drive Ubuntu touch, I would only open the Android app for as long as I needed it and immediately shut the system down. I would try to find native apps as much as possible.

I dunno about SlopGPT but I can absolutely believe he’d have a locally running LLM trained on nothing but religious texts or something

Itself? I wouldn’t think so. But like almost all Android phones it comes with Google services so there’s that. They said the Bootloader will be unlockable to that should be able to be mitigated…

I’d say less than a mainstream flagship.

I made a community for it: !clickscommunicator@thelemmy.club

It even has some of the design team from Blackberry

Yeah that looks mega cool but it’s not a cellular device, so I’d still need a phone. I’m really not interested in carrying more devices.

I really want a Linux phone but I e played with them and they are just not to the point of being able to use as a sole device yet.

The bootloader will be unlockable, what ROMs will be installable is going to depend on the community

They’ve shipped hardware before so I don’t think it’s total vaporware. They’ve said the non-functional devices they’ve shown at CES had the real screen and keyboard hardware so it seems somewhat far along in the manufacturing/design stage. But yeah, everyone would like to see the real deal.

It actually does have an SD card slot. And headphone jack.

That’s their marketing pitch but it has every feature you’d need to make it your only phone, which is my plan.

They’ve announced 5 years of support.

And it’s small but not really small. Here is a 3d printed mockup next to a Galaxy S25 Ultra

It’s every bit as wide, just shorter.

But I meant compromises that would make it not usable as a phone.

Unfortunately the GrapheneOS team said it doesn’t meet their requirements. Their requirements are suuuuuuper specific which is why it’s only on Pixel devices.

They have said that the bootloader can be unlocked, so some sort of ROM support is possible.

GrapheneOS complete requirements:

• Support for using alternate operating systems including full hardware security functionality
• Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week for device support code (firmware, drivers and HALs)
• At least 5 years of updates from launch for device support code with phones (Pixels now have 7) and 7 years with tablets
• Device support code updated to new monthly, quarterly and yearly releases of AOSP within several months to provide new security improvements (Pixels receive these in the month they’re released)
• Linux 6.1, 6.6 or 6.12 Generic Kernel Image (GKI) support
• Hardware accelerated virtualization usable by GrapheneOS (ideally pKVM to match Pixels but another usable implementation may be acceptable)
• Hardware memory tagging (ARM MTE or equivalent)
• Hardware-based coarse grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) for baseline coverage where type-based CFI isn’t used or can’t be deployed (BTI/PAC, CET IBT or equivalent)
• PXN, SMEP or equivalent
• PAN, SMAP or equivalent
• Isolated radios (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.), GPU, SSD, media encode / decode, image processor and other components
• Support for A/B updates of both the firmware and OS images with automatic rollback if the initial boot fails one or more times
• Verified boot with rollback protection for firmware
• Verified boot with rollback protection for the OS (Android Verified Boot)
• Verified boot key fingerprint for yellow boot state displayed with a secure hash (non-truncated SHA-256 or better)
• StrongBox keystore provided by secure element
• Hardware key attestation support for the StrongBox keystore
• Attest key support for hardware key attestation to provide pinning support
• Weaver disk encryption key derivation throttling provided by secure element
• Insider attack resistance for updates to the secure element (Owner user authentication required before updates are accepted)
• Inline disk encryption acceleration with wrapped key support
• 64-bit-only device support code
• Wi-Fi anonymity support including MAC address randomization, probe sequence number randomization and no other leaked identifiers
• Support for disabling USB data and also USB as a whole at a hardware level in the USB controller
• Reset attack mitigation for firmware-based boot modes such as fastboot mode zeroing memory left over from the OS and delaying opening up attack surface such as USB functionality until that’s completed
• Debugging features such as JTAG or serial debugging must be inaccessible while the device is locked

They have confirmed that you can unlock the bootloader, and are claiming 5 years of updates.

They have shipped hardware before and seem like a somewhat reputable company. They haven’t made a phone before though so we shall see.

They have confirmed that you can unlock the bootloader to you’ll be able to root it yes.

Some people do that, most commonly with one being a “work” phone. But I think the idea is insane for the majority of people.

The Spacebar has a built-in fingerprint sensor, which could be handy for unlocking the phone quickly. The keypad is touch-sensitive, which means that you can slide your fingers over it to scroll through messages. And before you ask, yes, it also has a 4.03-inch OLED touchscreen display for those of us who like scrolling on a smoother surface.

Some of you may also be pleased to know that the Clicks Communicator has a 3.5mm headphone jack and that it supports microSD cards for storage expansion. It ships with 256GB storage and you can add a microSD card with up to 2TB of capacity.

The device runs Android 16, supports Qi2 wireless charging, has a USB-C port, and has a 50-MP rear camera with optical image stabilization, alongside a 24-MP front camera. It’s powered by a 4nm MediaTek chip that has 5G support. It’s a dual-SIM phone with one physical SIM slot and an eSIM

It also has NFC for mobile payment support. I’m not seeing many compromises here except perhaps the camera and processor. I’m gonna use this as my next phone.

The Clicks marketing team has been marketing this as a “second device”. I think that’s a miss-step. Very few people want to have two phones. They exist, but it seems like this device should be a completely capable phone on it’s own. It’ll be a niche device either way but I think the “people who want a small phone with physical buttons” niche is larger than the “people who want two phones of of which is small with physical buttons” crowd. And it causes confusion. Some people saw the announcement and didn’t realize it’s a full fledged independent phone…

Ctrl-R

Try it. Please, I beg you.

Firstly you most likely just cannot. Device support is very narrow.

But I have a phone I got secondhand just to play with it. I want to love it, but it feels dated. The gestures make using a lot of stuff hard. But the biggest thing is that in my country I can’t even make calls due to no VoLTE support. Kinda kills even using it daily even as an experiment.

I did submit a pull request to add Colemak keyboard layout support to the keyboard though, which was accepted. So technically I’m a contributor :)

It’s also important to know that E2E is a great step, but having Meta knowing who you talk to and how often is still bad.

And as long as Meta has control over the frontend that receives the messages, they could compromise your “E2E encrypted” messages at any time.

But hey it’s a step in the right direction.