For reference, Octopart is useful to track prices from many distributors, linked below [0] is a commonly used memory (1G) for Rockchip, Amlogic, Allwinner on many Radxa and Orange Pis.
You can now run Docker images in Termux with Udocker/proot[0], the disk IO can be a bottleneck for large databases when using proot.
Tailscale works with "--tun=userspace-networking" [1].
I had it running on an old phone as a Frigate server with a solar powerbank in remote area, using the 4G as a failover. The uptime is almost a week without solar.
Attiny hooked to the power button and a photodiode on the phone flash [2] (blink per minute) used as a watchdog for shutdowns/hangs to hardware reset. The button cap is removed without disassembling the phone.
Old phones are still more efficient than most off the shelf SBCs, especially under load.
~3W compared to 12W with a Pi5 in the same performance ballpark.
The new(er) mid range chipsets indeed are so so nice now. Pretty/fully modern process nodes, battery efficient, still very respectable cores.
Really glad to see we've finally landed at a place where finding an old refurbished flagship is not the only logical choice, where the mid-range has a lot going on for it.
Just wish we had some mainline kernel support, could put Debian on these things! I've had a OnePlus 6T (2018) that supposedly does pretty ok that I've been meaning to try Mobian on, and it felt like for a bit Snapdragons were getting better and better Linux support. But that motion seems to have really tapered off in the last ~2 years?
I had a Moto X4 which was quite cheap for $200 or $250. It did everything perfectly. No discernable lag for any operation. Plenty of storage. Great battery life. I can't imagine "needing" more phone than this.
Unfortunately it reached the end of its (security) updates so I figured it would be unsafe to keep using it since I have banking apps on the phone. Sad.
Non-generic adapters are fixed in custom ROMs/LOS, on stock Android 16 my ZTE modem is still reporting as usb0 due to MAC address local bit, while Huawei dongle works just fine.
Android phone to android tablet USB tethering is also local MAC and non-functional.
Still using a very old Tab S 10.5 from 2014 running a bit slow with LOS 21 - Android 14.
Started with Android 4 KitKat, stuck with Linux kernel 3.4 :)
5.4mm thickness, 3GB RAM (enough for 32-bit), 2TB SD card works, watching movies/shows with the AMOLED look as good as a recent OLED TV. Truly ahead of their time.
SDR content with mDNIe dynamic enabled comes surprisingly close to HDR content on an HDR display, colors can be a bit too staturated though.
After a decade, the battery lasts a week for daily hour e-book with black background. 3 hours of video playback.
However, it restarts at 30% battery when running at full brightness with a white background.
Disabling Wi-Fi significantly extends standby time compared to modern hardware.
Caveats: Slow web browsing and no H.265 hardware decoder.
1440p H.264 60Mbit is the max (Display is 1600p).
Most content providers and streaming services are slowly moving away from AVC, so it's stuck at 720p H.265 on CPU.
Back in 2014, I couldn't have imagined using hardware that was over a decade old.
[0] https://octopart.com/part/nanya/NT6AN256T32AV-J2