Hellaphone -- Inferno on Android phones

I've intentionally never owned a smartphone. I used a Nokia 3310 for 12 years, starting in high school. When it finally broke (and I was a 30-ish young dad), there were always several "old phones" abandoned by family members or close relatives, so I've been using those to their end ever since. The current one is a Nokia 2600, which I genuinely dislike (tiny buttons, overengineered menu system), but the miserable thing stubbornly works, so what can I do? IIRC, the idea of constantly reading e-mail or browsing the web from some tiny phone screen made me really uneasy even as a young adult. I surely liked computers, but that, I felt, would be too much. Would I really need anything else except SMS and direct calls from a phone, I thought? Probably not. I loved talking to telecom salespeople when I had that 3310. "We have this new offer, so many megabytes of Internet, and... what's your current phone, by the way?" they would ask. "A 3310," I replied. "...Well, that's surely a classic , sir!" they would reply after a few seconds of silence. I successfully worked as a journalist for years, whilst living in the dumb phone world. I don't remember having any problems. Neither have I ever gotten hopelessly lost on car trips with only a paper map, or hand-written directions, etc. During the last 3-4 years, though, I do sometimes feel like getting in the way of others, or of life: more and more relevant services seem to assume that the user has a smartphone. But I guess that's life. I do

There is/was a Hellaphone[1] project, based on Inferno, a Plan 9 successor. There are also some slides[2] and a video demonstration[3] available. [1]: link [2]: link [3]: ▶ this video

Don't give up on android yet, it's just a dumb linux and despite vendor plots you can make it into dumb android like this guy did: ▶ this video Cyanogen mod is going in the "smart" direction, but a mod could go in the other direction too. Slides for hellaphone here link Edit: Add slides link

Here's a short video I threw together demonstrating the phone. It's pretty spur of the moment, and the video quality is low, but you may be able to get an idea of how it works: ▶ this video Also check out link for screenshots.