Yeah you won't find them for $5 unless you buy in bulk on Alibaba

Aliexpress has this as the best selling one though the chipset is not confirmed https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006924641101.html

Well I take my gamble, wait 2 weeks and see what I'll get

Just fyi, the device at that link is currently showing $9.62 for a single unit, once logged in and the one-time-only "Welcome deals" are eliminated. But AliExpress pricing can vary hour by hour based on seller, inventory, algorithm, RNG.

I just bought one for $1.07 US with free shipping. I was buying with a new account so I probably got that discount. But even so, before buying I got $2.99 the first time I loaded the page, then $9.89 or thereabouts, and finally $0.99 (which I bought, it had an additional $0.08 in fees for $1.07 total). We’ll see if it shows up and is hackable, but at that price it feels too good to pass up the chance.

Just wanted to update that I got this in the mail today. Not bad—6 days from order to delivery, all for just over a dollar. I haven’t tried to hack it at all yet. Here are photos: https://imgur.com/a/J7S8rEW

One more update: it’s a UZ801, with the Qualcomm MSM8916 chipset (according to `adb shell getprop ro.product.model` etc, and the fact that openstick works). I got it running Debian without much trouble, and it’s working great. I followed the tutorial for openstick at https://wthoog.nl/openstick/ (which seems to be down for me now).

I got the one that’s white with a bit of red near/under the cap.

One other thing that took me a bit to figure out: after removing the cap, the entire back of the device slides off (kind of like a battery cover in a remote) and there is a spot to put a SIM card beneath. Supposedly this does GPS too but I haven’t figured out how yet.

I've noticed the wild fluctuations in price as well (by $10), is there some trick to timing the RNG right? I'm guessing it's intentional to get you to keep refreshing.

Which one did you buy, the red one or the white one? I do want a device that runs openstick, but I don't want more ewaste if it's the wrong one.

EDIT: According to this post[1] above, this listing[2] should be the real thing, as the red variant does say SSID 4G-UFI-XX under the cap.

[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/ [2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006860833351.html

Looks like both those are the same, judging by the review pictures too

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006924641101.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006860833351.html

They basically all come in 4-6 designs, but only difference is how easy it to get to edl / adb.

On some of them you just load debug webpage and on others you might need to ground some pins.

Well, I guess my post was slightly misguided on price because I bought them in South East Asia and they look a bit more pricey in EU / US now. Might be some tariff price changes played the role IDK.

As for the chip basically almost all USB+LTE+WIFI sticks on Chinese marketplaces using it. They all have slightly different way to get adb / edl and flash, but all seems somewhat open.