phones

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19802629

Smartphones are a shit-show so I bought some old Sony Ericsson feature phones from a flea market, expecting Gammu¹ to work as reported. It worked on one phone but not others (despite all of them reportedly working with Gammu).

Some msgs arrived and got trapped on the phone, which happened to have a dysfunctional screen. And gammu failed to access the phone (though it works on some phones). So I needed to run Sony’s proprietary garbage (“PC Companion”) on a Windows machine to get the msgs.

Sony’s PC Companion is designed to phone-home. The software launches but immediately goes to the cloud to check for updates so it can update itself. So obviously offline people are inherently fucked -- they can never sync their desktop and phone without the cloud.

But worse: Sony has taken down their server. Thus rendering all Sony phone syncing software installations useless. This thread is to document the big “Fuck you” from Sony to their customers.

¹ Gammu is free software syncs to old feature phones. You can send and receive SMS using the commandline this way.

This seems a bit off. Public payphones were what, 25¢/min? Now that they have been eliminated, the cash equivalent is a prepaid mobile service.

Public payphones had an infrastructure of phone booths that needed to be maintained, cleaned, and serviced. They consumed real estate.

Prepaid mobile service is a trivial deployment by comparison. I must maintain my own hardware. Yet my carrier charges 22¢/min in 2025. Comparable to the cost of public payphones.

If you sit in front of a PC with a big screen all day, smartphones are not a good way to do SMS. Rationale:

• you have to reach for a small screen & possibly tap around (enter PINs) to see the txt that just arrived
• smartphones have a huge attack surface; street-wise people do not put GSM chips in them
• to send a msg, you have to tap on a tiny keyboard (or fiddle with a dicey speech-to-text tool)
• if your phone breaks, you lose access to all your SMS msgs. (Gammu can copy all your SMS msgs even if your screen is shattered, but only from dumb phones)
• (countless software freedom issues here… gammu does not work with smartphones because smartphones do not support a standard AT command protocol)

Theoretically, isn’t gammu or gnokii a smarter way of working? If you have a text terminal and gnu screen/tmux running, possibly with irssi, it would be a much more efficient workflow if SMS msgs would arrive in an irssi window just like an IRC channel so you can use your full size keyboard to enter an SMS.

Anyone doing this?

I got gammu working on an old dumb phone. Haven’t checked yet whether it can be integrated into irssi or bitlbee.

Possible snag: serial connections are possibly unreliable with Gammu. My USB→serial DCU-65 cable attached to a Sony Ericsson dumb phone chronically disconnects and reconnects to the PC. I wonder if using bluetooth instead would solve that.

The gammu and gnokii projects seem to be somewhat idling.. having been pushed aside due to smartphones. But it’s unjust and an artifact of tech wisdom fading in the population.