What are your thoughts on the various de-googled custom ROM projects available for Google Pixel phones?

On the software side, they seem to be equally good from a technical standpoint: they let you live outside of google, be root etc.

I'm less a fan of the google pixel hardware: eInk devices provides a different experience.

In the "usual" (Google, Samsung...) western brands, there are no good eink pocket (cellphone sized or less, like the inkpalm or hisense) or normal sized eink tablet (>8" screen) alternatives, especially if you want color.

The kindles are more like phablets, and have lots of software limitations.

I have a color eink tablet with a 10" screen. Outside of Chinese companies, there isn't anything available. If there was such a google pixel device and I could reflash it and mod it as easily as Chinese devices and without limitations, I would consider it.

Have you seen the Boox Palma? If I didn’t love my Inkpalm so much I might consider one.

It seems a bit too big. I love my inkpalm too, especially how light it is!

If you are worried about that, you are honestly better off buying a pixel and putting grapheneos on it. 100% the cheap chinesium has other tracking/spying nonsense built in at levels lower than the android os, I think that's much less likely on pixel devices, especially with the grapheneos guys watching those devices.

> cheap chinesium has other tracking/spying nonsense built in at levels lower than the android os,

I have only found apps calling home.

If you think some malware is baked into the wifi firmware, I can't disprove that.

> I think that's much less likely on pixel devices, especially with the grapheneos guys watching those devices.

More eyeballs is better, but if we're talking about malware in the wifi firmware, I don't think graphene team can catch that either.

I would expect someone serious about this to have their spyware built to use the cellular to send the low bandwidth, high value stuff and then possibly wifi for larger data dumps.