I personally am concerned about the killswitches. They look like “push to activate” ones, but even if they were “slide to activate”, being so accessible will always make you worry like “my boss isn’t calling maybe I turned off radios?” - supposing here that I wanna take a nap or smth and my smartphone is on the table. You will always have to ask yourself about the killswitches “Have I accidentally turned them off?” This will result in checking the phone’s killswitches every time you leave it somewhere where you can’t see it (in another room, in the car, under a pillow… you name it) and it will soon enough make you go crazy and blame them.
The killswitches should be “accidental activation proof”, meaning that it should be hard for them to be activated by mistake, accidentally.
My suggestions:
make another button on the bottom, small, relatively hard to press which if not pressed - no killswitch can be switched.
or, make so that to activate a killswitch you need to click it twice and then press it for 2 seconds (for example)
any other suggestions are wellcome, I don’t insist on these suggestions, I just wanna bring your attention to something I consider being a “problem” once the smartphone will be released.
I have to say I like the concerns this brings up; there has to be a way to make the phone where people don’t accidentally activate these features. I can imagine someone doing that during a conversation. That would be very inconvenient.
Imho push bottons are the best chouse because i never push them for error in my life, and killswitches are not good when you put in a pocket, and add another switch to enable or disable kill switch make this phone with more switch than a mixer
I wrote my other concern on the firefox for librem5 topic
I’ve been thinking about the kill switches too. I have seen support for a GPS kill switch which I previously dismissed, “The GPS can’t transmit”. After thinking it over, I think we should have a “sensors” kill switch. It will switch off GPS, Gyros, Accelerometer etc. Just like the camera, and microphone, the sensors collect extremely personal information that could be leaked later.
That is the feature I want most on a future version of the phone.
I’m not entirely sure what would be the best way to handle the kill-switches, every choice seems to have unfortunate cons.
It’s unlikely, but one thing that I wish that the phone could have is a USB A port. I have an old Acer Iconia A200 tablet that has a USB A port and a mini USB. It’s thicker than most tablets, but if it were phone-sized it wouldn’t be too obnoxious.
Doesn’t even have to be a “full” port, just the contacts to hold a USB cable or thumb drive in place. Would be useful for USB A Yubi keys without an adapter.
Hi, as mentioned somehere else, Todd discusses killswitches and firmware/binary-blob issues in his interview with people from UBports. It is discussed in the second part of the interview.
The most likely is that there will be all the killswitches you see in the mockups, and a “master killswitch” that allows you to shut the power supply to all the different modules, and enable those you want from a software panel.
