> I'm hoping that with a set of peripherals (screen, mouse, keyboard) it will
be able to replace my ancient netbook as my work computer
Dont get your hopes up. Pine64 kept the cost of the device down in part by
not going with a faster computer than they needed. It's good enough for
simple things like SMS, but don't expect to get any serious work done on it.
It probably will not perform better than your netbook, and certainly not
better than your X60.
> That said, I'm also considering turning off the cell modem in the PinePhone
and using it as a small tablet, and keeping one of the Androids for cell
calls and texts. Since the cell modem is a proprietary black box by law,
those comms are inherently compromised, and it seems a shame to have the
nonfree cell modem software in the PinePhone running when I don't need to.
What is your threat model? For an average threat model, the attack vector
allowed by using the modem is that your cell carrier can track your location
and metadata for your phone calls and texts, and that your government can
probably get that information from the carrier pretty easily if they want to
(I'm not familiar with the laws in NZ, but in the US the govt doesn't even
need a warrant to do this). This will be the same whether your use the
Pinephone's modem or the Android device's modem. However, adding an Android
device into adds an additional attack vector: now Google gets has all that
information too, plus a little bit more, which an additional govt (USA) will
have pretty easy access too.
Are any of your Android devices supported by any ungoogled Android ROMS?
GrapheneOS is the best, but supports very few devices. That would make those
devices a better option, more secure overall than the Pinephone, although in
terms of location tracking, Pinephone has the advantage that you can use the
hardware switch to disable the modem sometimes, so you can have a little more
granularity in how you handle the privacy/convenience tradeoff of giving away
your location in order to access cell towers.
