You might have heard me mention before that I'm backing the http://neo900.org project, which is essentially a motherboard replacement for Nokia's N900 phone. The N900 (and Neo900, when it's ready) run Maemo, which is a modified version of Debian designed for phones, or "internet tablets" as they used to call them...lol.
Anyway, I couldn't wait so I decided to pick up a N900 to mess around with. When these were new they were really expensive, but you can pick one up in pretty much mint condition for about £50 now with a ton of accessories on ebay. The build quality is a league above most modern phones, and I'd say the camera is still better than the one on my 2013 N7.
Nokia/Microsoft have ended support for the phone, but a bunch of stubborn Linux users are stil providing updates and new features with what they call CSSU (community seamless software update, basically a PPA).
The greatest example of this that I can think of is the email client (modest). After the Poodle SSLv3 vulnerability was discovered late last year, many server admins disabled SSLv3, requiring clients to use TLSv1.0, 1.1 or 1.2. The original build of modest didn't support any of the new TLS protocols due to its age... so some kind soul patched the code, compiled a version with the required libraries and pushed it into the community repos. Who wouldv'e thunk it, users exercising the rights granted to them by free software licensing... kumbaya.
This thing is incredible. It only has a 600MHz processor and 256MB RAM to work with, yet somehow it's not infuriatingly slow. I really was expecting it to be crap, but it's perfectly usable. I have not overclocked it, although I could. I guess this is why the Jolla folks can get away with shipping a phone with "just" 1GB RAM in 2015 - most of the applications are written in C or C++ and there's no overhead from running Android's VM.
I've messed around with SSH apps on Android but the sticking point is always the horrible experience of typing linux commands on a touchscreen. The ability to access my servers remotely whenever I need to with an actual physical keyboard is invaluable to me.
Where was I when I heard about drupageddon? Not at home with access to my laptop, unfortunately. Within 12 hours of the security announcement and release of a fix, drupal sites were under attack. Upgrading would have taken about 5 minutes... my site wasn't attacked, but it could have been.
When the Neo900 is released, the extra RAM and better processor should allow me to run some more complicated programs like Libre/OpenOffice on it comfortably. A full office suite in my pocket!
The N900 is now my daily phone. Could it be yours? It depends how weird you are, I guess. Most people seem to want a camera with a huge screen that can make phone calls and run a few games + facebook, but that's not what I want to use my phone for. This thing is more like a pocket laptop.
Even if you're not looking to replace your phone, if you fancy something cool to tinker with why not pick one up for cheap and have at it!