Linux

Yeah there just isn't much attraction to using those old phones over wifi though. The N800 is basically a tiny Debian box and maybe I could think of a cool use for that, but tmux, raspberry pi, meshtastic gizmos, etc all compete too. Neither phone is able to usefully run a web browser. I used to be on talk.maemo.org which is where users of those phones hung out, but that site shut down some years ago.

I haven't received it yet but apparently not good. It's a $200 phone. I mostly want it because it runs Linux natively, has a regular unlocked bootloader that isn't designed to be frustrating like android phones, and can send display over USB-C so it's like a regular computer. You can run anything like emulating windows apps, you could install steam on it technically by putting it in an emulation container, but the chipset is very old at this point, and so you aren't going to be emulating anything remotely modern on it. It is just a PC in your pocket though. You have a package manager, you can install many different Linux distros on it. You can get a LoRa radio mesh case for it, a physical keyboard/battery case, which I will probably get eventually. I think it's worth the 200 dollars. I really want to get away from android. It's hard because everything from Arm CPUs to the modems are completely proprietary. The only reason this device exists is because the design docs got leaked.

It does have phone, sms, and your standard phone stuff. You can get several different desktop environments like plasma mobile or gnome mobile and several others. It has 3 GBs of ram, and the OS usually takes up around 500 MB. It has dip switches to disable the hardware like the camera, cell modem, wifi, bt, etc. It would be a great device for taking to defcon.