I grabbed mine from AliExpress.

It can be a bit of a gamble (the sellers usually don't specify the exact SOC on the description) but given the price you're not taking that much of a risk.

Worst case scenario you end up with a backup 4G dongle.

[delayed]

It's runs a mainline Linux kernel so it's possible to compile everything from source without any issues of you want to be absolutely sure. I haven't done so but I did asked Claude to check for anything suspicious and it did not find anything.

I guess a big advantage of constrained hardware with a minimal surface is that there's not that many places to hide something.

Obviously I would not recommend running this if you're in charge of Cybersecurity for Fort Knox but for a Homelab the risk seems manageable.

I have about 300 that I need to sell and I have some software that can run a “factory” to flash and restore your Linux distribution while preserving the IMEI.

They are all the same board variant on which the SIM works and have the msm8916 chip.

You have 300 of them and already verified them? Are you starting a store? Can I have some?

Yep, drop me an email (see bio).

Make them available while this post is up and you'll sell out in days.

https://openstick.org/ doesn't sell them directly, but has links to buy them and a lot of info.