65K views · Sep 17, 2011 · 5:30 · 1 HN recommender · 4 mentions · discussed 2011–2022
A short demo of Inferno, the Plan 9 descendant operating system, running on an Android phone as Hellaphone. It shows calls, SMS and data working. The video quality is rough because the camera was held in front of the screen.
Why Hacker News points people here: Shared as a demo of a minimal Inferno-based phone OS and an unusual dumb-phone approach.
“Here's a short video I threw together demonstrating the phone.”HN comment, 2011
“you can make it into dumb android like this guy did”
Hellaphone turns Android into a dumb phone
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.”
Author's quick demo of the phone
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.
“a video demonstration[3] available”
Video demo of Hellaphone
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
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
