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Comment by thepete2 | Hacker News Reader

They plan on making a keyboard for the Pinephone which effectively gives you a ~$250 phone-sized linux computer with a cell phone modem. That's seriously cool

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Oh and btw. for the price of an iPhone charger [0] you can literally buy 3 extra batteries plus charger ... [1]

[0] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHXH3AM/A/magsafe-charger

[1] https://pine64.com/product-category/smartphone-spare-parts

I love that the battery is replaceable. Though I wish mobile devices included tiny backup batteries that give you ~1min to swap the battery without having to reboot the device. This would especially be useful for my gopro which I often use for long captures that I don't want to interrupt. But it would also be nice on my PinePhone.

They won't let you buy those batteries in non-US locations. The "suggested alternative" is to file down a Samsung battery.

As appalling as this is, I kind of love it. Pine stuff is for hackers 8-)

Those 65W Navitas based chargers are actually all exact copies of the reference design, and most are made by a single factory.

GaNFETs are there mostly for the marketing, and don't make any much more difference than few percents efficiency at such power level.

I'd have to look at the numbers, but a few percent points of efficiency can be a big difference in the power (and thus heat) dissipation of the device; going from 90% to 92% efficiency reduces the power dissipated in the device by 20%.

And it will be a very usable keyboard with additional power underneath.

Where and when can I get a decent laptop with a cell phone modem built in, so I can just use that for messaging apps, and only own a dumb phone.

I have an old ThinkPad X230 with a WWAN modem. Installed OpenBSD to it and it just works as a nice small travel laptop.

The model is from year 2013.

How do you use the WWAN? How could I install, say Whatsapp or Signal, on my laptop?

Signal has a desktop app; you might need to put the sim into an android/iOS device for initial setup.

You'd have to activate it with a cell provider that supports WWAN and then you can just use the desktop (or web) versions of WhatsApp or Signal.

The WhatsApp desktop app (or web version) actually communicates with your smart phone to do the actual sending/receiving/communications.

If you turn off your cell phone and attempt to use WhatsApp web it will fail.

Lenovo has offered WWAN options for ages, continuing what was already an established IBM ThinkPad option.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14726/samsung-announces-alway...

I have an HP EliteBook which has a built-in modem and a micro-SIM slot.

Have you run linux on it ? I'm running mint on mine, and can't get the sim/modem to work. Says there is a driver, won't install it. Have tried phone and tablet Sims. No joy with either.

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