The topic Someone turned a $50 smartphone into a Linux laptop, and it works better than… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but PC and laptop prices have been pretty terrible the past few months. With the great AI rush causing people to vacuum up RAM sticks and storage by the dozen, there isn’t much left for folks who want to build or purchase a new computer.
However, the smartphone market hasn’t been rocked nearly as hard. So, what if you could save some money and turn a smartphone into a Linux laptop? Well, one person has done just that with a $50 phone, and it works surprisingly well.
As spotted by Hackaday, you can read about this cool venture over on Gabriel Broussard Korr’s blog, R Bites. Korr noticed that, while phones pack some seriously good hardware these days, they can still be quite pricey. However, they also discovered that there’s a way to get their hands on a phone for much less:
There’s a thing cell providers do now where they sell a phone at 1/4th the market cost (wow!), but lock the cell service to their specific company (e.g. Verizon)— if you buy the phone and want to use it as a phone, you must use that company. The idea is that, because cell service is relatively expensive, someone buying the phone will end up paying more than the cost of the phone to the service provider if they use it for a few years.
But what if we didn’t use it as a phone? A smartphone with no cell service is still a functioning computer (including WiFi access!), and as I said, its specs are pretty decent now…
The solution was to purchase a Moto G Power 2024 for a cool $50, attach a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, install Termux on the phone, and then use that to install XFCE. You can then open up the XFCE desktop and run apps like GIMP and Shotcut at “a very reasonable speed.” Korr was pretty pleased with the results, and they were nice enough to detail the steps and code used in their blog, so be sure to check it out if you, too, feel like giving a Moto G Power 2024 a second life.