Tony Lindgren is currently working on mainline kernel support for the Motrola Droid 4 (Wikipedia, GSMArena, iFixit Teardown). He documented his work to get serial over USB on the following page: http://muru.com/linux/d4. I just got myself a used one via Ebay, since it's a decent upgrade from the Nokia N9xx phones. It's also quite cheap (30$ in US, 50€ after import to DE (shipping + customs)). Last but not least there is no newer phone available, which has a proper hardware keyboard.
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While improving slowly, the mainline kernel’s support for smartphones is quite bad. One of the better supported phones is the Nokia N900. Apart from a few missing features, which could improve the performance of some operations (like crypto acceleration), its currently lacking support for two missing features:
Bluetooth Cameras I worked on both tasks during my master’s thesis, but in this post let’s focus on the Bluetooth module. For Bluetooth support the Nokia N900 has broadcom’s bcm2048 chip (which also supports FM radio, but that’s out of scope for this post).
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