Sitting In The Sandbox Dreaming Of A Hackable Smartphone

Smartphones Would Be So Much More Interesting If We Could Play With Them

Hackaday has a dream, a very unlikely one, but one likely shared with a lot of tech enthusiasts; the ability to tinker with our smartphones.  It is deeply unfair that only hackers can do interesting things to our phones, and those interesting things are horrible as opposed to fun.   What if we lived in a world where we could actually hack and modify our smartphones to the same extent we can do to our PCs?  Unfortunately smartphones are incredibly user unfriendly for those of us who like to tinker.  The devices, be it iOS or Android, are locked to us and we can’t load new OS versions of our choice or even just make more than basic changes to the device. 

You can root a smartphone to get a little more control, but still the customization options are pathetic compared to a PC.  The dream includes a pre-installed Python interpreter, with a healthy amount of graphics libraries, and possibly even an I2C accessory port.  With those additions you would get vastly more control over your smartphone and it would be a significantly more interesting piece of hardware.   Perhaps one day a Framework-like phone might arrive to fulfill this dream.