Espruinofone

This is just pondering/thinking out loud....
I've been going through a phase of really disliking pretty much any current/modern smartphone, and I had been looking and pondering alternatives and saw devices such as:
https://www.thelightphone.com/ although as far as I can see that's still just an android phone under the skin, but stripped down, so still limited hacking ability.
but seeing components like this: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2323.html made me wonder, could a reasonable hackable espruino driven phone be constructed with a small number of basic off the shelf components?
(I had pondered the rak5010 for the guts since I'm very familiar with it, and it's got an impressive set of features, but looks like the BG9x only has VoLTE)

Hi! Yes, I think you could do something... I definitely remember seeing some GSM/etc breakout board that had headphone/mic jacks on it.

Even the phone modules are generally pretty easy to wire up so you could do a custom PCB with a Espruino MDBT42/MDBT50 and phone modules, and an Epaper or LCD slapped on it.

However it's quite a lot of work, and I'm not sure the end result would be much better than a Nokia candybar phone ;)

However it's quite a lot of work

Yeah well, everyone needs a hobby. :D
Definitely some interesting phone modules, albeit most of the breakout all-in-ones seem to be 2G only. So a custom board is probably the way to go, might have a play.

not much better than a Nokia candybar phone

Yeah I still use an ancient Sony dumbphone when I don't need connectivity, but I like the flexibility of the js runtime you've created with espruino which you'd still be missing on a candybar.
Just thinking the hybrid of a flexible "bangle" style ecosystem on a handheld but with the added built in connectivity and obviously phone functionality might be fun.

some of them are available in 4G as well, even if, you are correct, then tend to disappear over time, at least the ones with analog audio
--> https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/A7670E_Cat-1_HAT