A year has passed since Commodore, the computer brand many of you know and love, came back from the dead under new ownership. The comeback is picking up pace too, with a lineup that already includes multiple Commodore 64 Ultimate editions, a C64X PC, and a licensing program that invites outside builders to use the name. Now, they have announced a return to the phone market, and not in the doomscrolling glass-slab avatar we are all used to, but in a retro, very equippable flip phone format…
That seems pretty neat. I like that it’s a “dumb” phone that can still use most apps.
Price seems a bit steep at $600, though.
Only a bit?
I understand custom hardware isn’t cheap, but this comes preloaded with WhatsApp apparently. Surely there’s a little kickback from Facebook for that.
Lol ya this whole phone makes no sense
II get the appeal of a flip phone, but this product already exists for around $150 just with a crappier OS. There’s a whole brand called Qin (https://qinphone.com/) that sells Android phones with T9 keyboards, and I can find weirdly named Chinese flip phones like the Unifone S22 for just shy of $150. Sure, they run dated hardware and software, but there’s no guarantee they would perform any worse or get any shorter battery life than whatever Commodore is proposing.
Commodore is just giving us Jolla with a hefty freaking price tag.
Qin doesn’t make a flip phone, they don’t use Linux, a worse camera, a shitty DAC, no headphone jack, and they’re all loaded with Google Apps / Spyware.
They aren’t the same product at all.
Then I mentioned the Uniphone S22
Is the camera $350 worse?
At least that one is flip phone so it’s closer but it’s still not running Linux, has a worse camera, no earphone jack, no FM radio, half the RAM, far less storage, worse CPU and so on.
Is all of that worth
$350$250? Depends on your use case I suppose but it’s absolutely not the same product.Nokia sells flip phones for under $100 that use KaiOS. They were more like $60 before the current shitshow in the US.
Unless there’s a tremendous performance bump for the price, it seems more and more like this just isn’t worth it. And I’m not sure if people want the performance bump anyway…
I am sure there is a big leap in both performance and build quality compared to the Nokias, but for what was originally a $60 phone, it is a great value even at $100. I don’t see any “great value” with this Commodore phone, even though I do like many aspects of it.