phones

If you sit in front of a PC with a big screen all day, smartphones are not a good way to do SMS. Rationale:

• you have to reach for a small screen & possibly tap around (enter PINs) to see the txt that just arrived
• smartphones have a huge attack surface; street-wise people do not put GSM chips in them
• to send a msg, you have to tap on a tiny keyboard (or fiddle with a dicey speech-to-text tool)
• if your phone breaks, you lose access to all your SMS msgs. (Gammu can copy all your SMS msgs even if your screen is shattered, but only from dumb phones)
• (countless software freedom issues here… gammu does not work with smartphones because smartphones do not support a standard AT command protocol)

Theoretically, isn’t gammu or gnokii a smarter way of working? If you have a text terminal and gnu screen/tmux running, possibly with irssi, it would be a much more efficient workflow if SMS msgs would arrive in an irssi window just like an IRC channel so you can use your full size keyboard to enter an SMS.

Anyone doing this?

I got gammu working on an old dumb phone. Haven’t checked yet whether it can be integrated into irssi or bitlbee.

Possible snag: serial connections are possibly unreliable with Gammu. My USB→serial DCU-65 cable attached to a Sony Ericsson dumb phone chronically disconnects and reconnects to the PC. I wonder if using bluetooth instead would solve that.

The gammu and gnokii projects seem to be somewhat idling.. having been pushed aside due to smartphones. But it’s unjust and an artifact of tech wisdom fading in the population.