Any details on the technology? “Beaming phone signals” doesn’t tell anyone much. Would this require a proprietary antenna (thus new, flagship-only models after a few years, like iPhone 15 with its emergency satellite calls) for whatever protocol Starlink uses (unless there is some unified ground-to-satellite protocol by now)?
Satellite phones aren’t new, but are expensive for obvious reasons.
Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is “no coverage” for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside “conspiracy theory” was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.
Have no idea if the situation changed since then.
Slightly morbid academic one.
My computer science professor (who is from Eastern Europe) was explaining an algorithm that he and another professor (from South America) developed. The algorithm processes a graph by first creating a “frame” around it. Since English was not the first language for either of them, the first word they thought of was karkas (каркас, frame in Russian). English word “carcass” sounds pretty much the same, right? but only later, after the work was submitted, they realized they were creating a dead body around the graph.
Other than with language models, this has already happened: Take a look at apps such as Merlin Bird ID (identifies birds fairly well by sound and somewhat okay visually), WhoBird (identifies birds by sound, ) Seek (visually identifies plants, fungi, insects, and animals). All of them work offline. IMO these are much better uses of ML than spammer-friendly text generation.
I was interested in these “light” phones for a bit, but they seem a bit gimmicky and expensive. I understand not having a browser on purpose, but for communication, none of them (AFAIK) support Matrix or even XMPP (even some old feature phones had a Java Jabber client). Punkt MP02 supports Signal though.
Android phone with custom ROM (Lineage, /e/, Graphene, DivestOS…) is a possibility, and would be usable until hardware is incompatible with the phone/wifi networks.
If you have a patience of a saint, PinePhone and Librem5 are Linux phones, both in fairly early stages.
Here are a few other interesting green automotive startups that didn’t make it:
I am curious if there have been studies on how much the slowness/delayed response of the device improves the attention span. (Since the distraction urge cannot be instantly satisfied)
Anecdotally, I find it very easy to get distracted when clicking on app takes fewer than a few seconds to start. When I test-drove the PinePhone, I felt I was much less distracted because bringing up the browser takes good 5-10 seconds, so I would only do that with a specific goal in mind.