Essential Phone, available now
Since no one else has, I&#x27;ll take the piss out of this &quot;hollier than thou&quot; bullshit.<p>&gt; Devices are your personal property. We won’t force you to have anything you don’t want.<p>Devices are your personal property. The SoC is still a proprietary trade secret, the baseband is still spying on you for the NSA, the GPU is still a closed blob piece of shit. No mainline driver support, bootloader is closed source, firmware is closed source. We own this phone, you don&#x27;t.<p>&gt; We will always play well with others. Closed ecosystems are divisive and outdated.<p>....<p>&gt; Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you.<p>Devices become outdated because shitty vendors refuse to open source and mainline drivers for their components.<p>&gt; Technology should assist you so that you can get on with enjoying life.<p>Technology should be trustable, and a device where you cannot tell if or when the microphone and&#x2F;or camera are recording and being remotely accessed is anything but.<p>Not wanting to single Essential out too much here - every vendor goes on and on about how great this phone is for you, while holding as much of a vice grip over the operation of the device as possible to make sure you need to buy another one as soon as possible through planned obsolescence. It is just the stick up the ass language announcements like these use is really infuriating when the people making them know full well how much they are screwing you over.<p>The first actually open platform phone is the one that will have longevity. The rest are snake oil about how good they will take of you because you can&#x27;t take care of yourself with your own software that you can trust.