I think the project is novel and cute.. but in terms of usage given most mobiles these days are used to access content rather than make calls I am not sure of the longterm suitability for most use cases. There’s a lot of “Well just plug it in to something to get even more things” but I am sure having to plug your mobile into a monitor or TV to read your e-mails is going to get boring relatively fast.

Also as already stated most network operators (at least UK ones at least) have a planned death date for 3G, some have already been shutting it down.

When I saw this I immediately thought of the Nokia 3210 reboot (fun and useful for those that want a dumb-ish phone just for calls and/or texts). That said I suspect the phone could be fairly good fun for sending SMS via a PC or making apps that interact via SMS.