A browser would be quite tough on such an embedded system, you would need to really think outside of the box. The issue is that a browser could easily need more space to render than is available, have tonnes of images, require JS, etc.

On my machine. the lightweight browser dillo is 852kB, and that doesn't include the shared libraries (I could 26 on my machine). It's not going to be easy to get a similar experience running.

> Feel free to pile on and tell me which devices I've missed..! :-) I'm sure there must be some out there, considering that "cell phone in a chip" is pretty much a whole category now ie the qualcomm snapdragon chips, mediatek, etc.

I'm hoping to add to the list of devices myself maybe next year. It's a very difficult space to operate in.

> ... (reading more about it) actually, is it true that design/certification of a small device that boasts a cellular module is a lot harder than an esp32/wifi-only board? which explains why there isn't a plethora of cell-internet-enabled devices?

For the most part you can get already certified modules, where the ESP32 is itself largely one of these modules (the small ones with the metal body on a thin PCB). I think cellular is mostly avoided due to the increase in BOM, and you're not easily going to get 4G/5G support.

But at a practical level, there's really extremely few situations where you actually need a WWAN modem. There's almost always wifi available and if not you almost always have a phone with an internet connection. That aside, a big part of why people make these devices is specifically to get away from always-connected internet devices.

It also may or may not need approval from whichever telco operator you're trying to connect to, and the user has to provide their own SIM and do the legwork to get a subscription. It's just not super practical. Not impossible, but a big pain in the ass for not much benefit.

The cheapest noname 4G USB stick you can buy now probably has a Qualcomm MSM8916 in it, and runs, I shit you not, Android.

As you can imagine, development with this kind of thing can be rather involved. No open development kits are available. There are no reference designs that don't require you to sign off on an NDA to access it, and Qualcomm wouldn't even want to talk to you unless you are at least "MOQ 100000+" tall.

The best you can do is get an existing modem module that hopefully doesn't bury too many of the interfaces you want, try to run your firmware on it, and then design your own board around that.

Which would probably yield a device that's inferior to most cheap smartphones or even feature phones.

Offline maps being a big one that you could maybe "just" do. If you really need to get the device online pull out your phone.

Though I feel like there's loads of stuff that are on LTE etc. Just... they're real companies doing real things and not people hacking together one-offs. Think agtech, vending machines etc.

I genuinely would ask, how do I have fun? Maybe this is a generational thing, but like where would start? I'm interested in demoscene stuff but know nothing about it.

I'm just a CRUDmonkey who only knows how to CRUD. I love the idea of carrying around a Pico calc and writing BASIC apps but in 2025 I don't know how to begin in a way that motivates me. Probably a personal weakness, but that's just my experience

Also 260kB of RAM on a 32bit processor could be a fair bit of code. Plus you could write it to external or internal flash. Though I don't know if esp-idf supports XIP (Zephyr does).

I hadn't heard about any Linux ports until I saw your comment here. Thanks!

The "playground" Linux port looks interesting, but it hasn't seen any updates for nearly a year. Still, I'm going to try it on a ESP32-S3 N16R8 and see how it goes.

It's funny, because I first ran Linux (SLS & Yggdrasil) on a PC with a 33MHz clock, 32MB RAM, and a 70MB hard drive. The N16R8 clock speed, RAM, and flash are all within an order of magnitude of what was on that old PC.

https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground

People keep throwing OS into anything that is slightly look like a graphic interface.