"Pinephone is completely orthogonal to this."

Do you mean Pine64 has no intention of trying to control what people do with the device?

Did anyone ever try to "root" the Sidekick? Always interested to hear more about it.

> Do you mean Pine64 has no intention of trying to control what people do with the device?

Explicitly not trying to control what you do makes up the majority of their business model.

I mean that that the Pinephone is not a DangerOS device, so anything that I say about the Danger Hiptop has nothing to do with the Pinephone.

Given that each has its own name, and the names look and sound different, maybe it's safe to assume no one is going to confuse the two.

Is there such a thing as a "DangerOS device", or are there devices that can or cannot run "DangerOS" (e.g., NetBSD plus proprietary software). The official slogan of the open source project is "Of course it runs NetBSD!" not "Of course it is a NetBSD device."

Anything said about an OS does not necessarily have anything to do with the device it runs on. Nor does anything said about a device necessarily have anything to do the OS being run on it. That's why we can have OS that run on a variety of devices (e.g., NetBSD, Linux, etc.), as well as devices on which we can boot a variety of OS (e.g., RPi, Pinephone).

Unfortunately this important distinction is carefully omitted from tech company marketing, ignored by sycophant tech bloggers, tech journalists and everyone who follows and subscribes to their brand of anti-competitive "innovation". Hopefully more hardware like RPi and Pinephone can change some people's thinking and allow them to see the possibilities that are constantly being suppressed in the "war on general purpose computing".

There are no longer any DangerOS devices. If you had a former DangerOS device, it is now dead hardware from the point of view of running DangerOS. You could buy one and look for a serial JTAG access and then hope for a root exploit -- I suspect that the boot process was not locked in any real way -- but you would have:

- a device with an extremely old battery

- without an open or available SDK

- with a pathetically slow CPU by modern standards

- with a pathetically small amount of RAM by modern standards

- with a mediocre keyboard under a screen with a nifty magnetic hinge mechanism but terrible specs (again, by modern standards)

- with, if I recall correctly, a very low speed GSM data connection

There's no reason to try to resurrect them.