@MrT10001 Those would be perfect. Yes they are designed for laptop or PC but should work alone with a tablet or phone as long as whatever drivers/software are there, which makes your statement correct because it probably wouldn't be, and speaking of that it probably wouldn't even work on my laptops because I have linux and not windows. That being said anyway I just got done with chat at straighttalk and was informed they don't offer plans for those devices anyway & I would have to get a mobile hotspot device and plan for that anyway.

EDIT:
I just hate thinking that in order to use my phone with ubuntu touch in any meaningful way I would have to now carry around two separate devices with me that have to stay charged.

EDIT 2:
Also I don't know why the heck they are so picky and nosy about what devices you use. Never gone thru that with home internet. I don't understand why here in the US you can't just get a sim card, buy a 4G data plan & put it in whatever the heck device you want to. Cause if that was the case I would just have a data plan & be using my phone that way now with just data.

@MrT10001 Thanks, basically it was what I was asking for just never heard of it called SIP i've always just heard of VoIP like with services like google voice number & when was able to call phone numbers with Yahoo Messenger way back in the day. Thank you for clearing it up. Speaking of WIFI hotspot that may be my only option to be able to use my phones with ubuntu touch as I don't think I'm going to be able to get them to have phone service or just a tablet plan with them. The other option I'm thinking is this https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-an-aircard-818325 finding an aircard meant for devices like laptops & tablets but then that is something I'd have to keep plugged into the phone & probably with an adapter depending on the USB port.

EDIT:
For example this card isn't USB-C so would have to have an adapter to plug it in to my pixel 3a. Also I didn't see any option on straighttalk when I looked to sign up for service with an aircard so I would have to find alternative for service with it. https://www.ebay.com/itm/224551936685?epid=1622974835&itmmeta=01HR09MZXGJX2JG22PJ5H1NYJR&hash=item344856a2ad:g:-J0AAOSwwvhhAZzo&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAAwAnkYFoEcJILDeIQr%2BSY%2BMDPSGZ%2B5DD%2FqTqxWmPEYWn3yyQQlWlwL4ci%2F3VJd1XFWE%2BRqMX1OAk1vn3NZeRyHaU%2FfOa5r5%2Fm85iwc03VhY%2FXwWddLU8x28PTxt94uC355v8aNHP3Kj5y9MNNiAUKCLvA34y1K4bpQBYHokZIFrhZbJrGTlKPLzdaQiF00MA4bzrGBxO9J48YF6sF9bHzHvJzov0E97YshOARejzGqZzsw8rOd4I9DiEyYb9Adym%2FhQ%3D%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR5T_04nAYw

@Moem PS, what is SIP?

@Moem Thanks. I'm in the US. I was using a OnePlus One phone for about a year then started getting notifications that my phone would be incompatible with the network in 2022, and haven't been able to go back to Ubuntu Touch since due to this.

Update to my question. I went on straighttalk website & discovered that to even get a tablet plan you must have a 5G capable tablet. Why are they so picky? Why can I have an only 4G capable phone and use data but to use a tablet they want me to have to have a 5G capable one. The only 2 phones I have that work with ubuntu touch(OnePlus One & Pixel 3a XL aren't 5G phones. Here is the screenshot from straighttalk.

Does anyone know of a carrier that allows the use of only 4G capable tablets & do you know if it would work if get a plan from them & use phone as tablet?

UPDATE:
Even without the first thing I mentioned, getting a VoIP service/app like Google Voice(and I mean like Google Voice but not, I hate google) for the phones, the biggest thing would be able to just get data on them so we can still use them like a tablet because I basically use my phone like that anyway I hardly ever actually make a call with it. But VoIP would be nice.

If the VoLTE implementation is going to take some time I believe we need a work around for this.

I had a OnePlus One phone & like others got text it would no longer be supported by my carrier.

My question is this? Would carriers allow you to use these same phones they are saying is incompatible with the network if we only wanted to buy just data service and use them as a tablet instead of a phone?

And if so would it be easier to work on a solution for us to have VoIP service in that case just kind of like before you could have services such as Google Voice on a phone and use that service just like your normal phone service thru your data?

I think that would be a good solution as long as whatever app/service has no privacy concerns.

@kugiigi Thank you for your responses. I gave SteamOS a try & I do think it is a great experience and I like it very much just like scrolling the TV with a game console which is basically what I wanted as to avoid the Xbox. My goal was to get away from big-tech. I had a chromebook which I done away with and now use a laptop with Linux Mint. Now have a phone with Ubuntu Touch. Already had a desktop with Linux Mint but now also have SteamOS so I can spend less time with big-tech devices/software.

The only issue I have with SteamOS(would have had same issues with Ubuntu TV) is that there aren't any desktop apps for TV streaming services. Trying to avoid Netflix anyway, but Netflix and Hulu I think both used to have desktop apps for Linux and each discontinued the apps. I would be happy though with Crackle or Popcornflix but there aren't any apps there either. SlingTV has a desktop app for Windows 10, but not Linux. This is the only drawback so far as I am trying to have a solution like what I had on Xbox, but using Linux instead. I did manage to get Kodi installed in SteamOS but I would much rather have apps from the actual companies than to use Kodi, but atleast I can scroll through Kodi with my gamepad just like I would the streaming services apps, because trying to do this with a browser sucks. Hopefully these companies will go back to making Linux apps in the future.

I think I will download and install SteamOS on my desktop alongside Linux Mint and Windows this weekend and give that a try. I don't know what I was thinking, but that is probably the best solution for me and is probably exactly what I have been looking for all along.

@kugiigi https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ seems like a great option but I'm actually more turned off by the voice controls but I guess that can be disabled hopefully. Also it appears to be for ARM processors only, but I guess I would still be able to game with steam because isn't the Nvidia Shield ARM based? If so I wonder if it would be possible to put plasma bigscreen on an Nvidia Shield as I would guess it has better CPU & GPU than Raspberry Pi. Then my next question though would be whether or not Steam would be available on plasma bigscreen. I really wish someone would just develop a shell for Ubuntu that has a nice TV interface, so that way I can just use everything available on my computer, the applications, the processing power, GPU, tuner cards, steam app, etc. that already work with Ubuntu, but have a nice TV user interface to scroll around the TV on.

@kugiigi I just got done looking at it, and I think this would be great. You are talking about KDE Plasma Bigscreen correct? I am a bit confused as to whether this is an OS or a shell for an OS as when I first started searching about it I just typed in KDE plasma and results came up for installing it in ubuntu and I thought that would be terrific, but then saw the screenshots which looked like a desktop computer shell, not for TVs. So kept digging until I saw Plasma Bigscreen but still looking around at different articles about it, but so far looks great.

@kugiigi Thank you for your reply. Where do I find this KDE TV UI?

I put this in Off Topic because it isn't about phones or Ubuntu Touch.

Does the UBports team only work with Ubuntu Touch? The reason I ask is I'm trying to eliminate as much big-tech from my life as possible. So far I have a phone with Ubuntu Touch, and Linux Mint on my laptop. I went away from android phone and chromebook for my daily drivers.

Usually after getting home from work I'd spend about half my evening on my laptop and the other half on my Xbox. I'm really trying to get away from the Xbox. My desktop has Linux Mint as well along with Steam and I have HDMI hooked to the TV but I don't use it much as trying to scroll around and seeing the little icons from the couch just doesn't work for me, nor do I think Ubuntu desktop would if I had that instead.

I see the answer to my solution right here https://www.ubuntufree.com/how-to-install-ubuntu-tv/
but it looks as though development has stopped on this, and I tried to put it on a laptop and had the same issues the guy had who commented at the bottom. Even though it is an unfinished product I'd be happy with this if it were halfway working, and was able to use a bluetooth gamepad to scroll through the Ubuntu TV shell on my TV as it looks as though scrolling would be nice and easy just like a game console.

Are there any plans to bring this back? Is there anyway to still get this however unfinished it is(as the information provided on that webpage doesn't work)? Is this something UBports would consider working on in the future? This seems like the only good solution for TV out there for anyone wanting the capabilities of a smart TV, without Google, Microsoft, or Sony. Would really like to try this out on my desktop.

I would like a feature implemented that allows you to have 2 background images. Select one for portrait mode and another for landscape mode. For example now I have a picture set as background which looks fine vertically, but when I flip the phone horizontally the image gets cropped and doesn't look right so it would be nice to to have an alternate image display for landscape.

@rocket2nfinity Thank you both for your replies you've both been a great help. But when you say RCS is that referring to the Chats in messaging issue I was having(not really an issue after had wife change to send sms or mms only) or is that referring to the other issue I am having with not being able to send a text to an email address?

@ubuntutouchfan If you really want to stay away from google I would use another service than youtube. BitChute, odysee, etc. But if you must use youtube(or any other video platform for that matter) you can avoid signing in and instead add each of your favorite channels to a bookmarks folder for easy access. For example on my browser I have a bookmarks folder named "BitChute Channels" where I add all channels that I like. I try to always avoid signing into sites I do not have to unless it is absolutely necessary.

I recently bought two cheap Oneplus One phones off ebay listed as parts hoping to make 1 good one out of two. Both were listed as no power, but one was listed as having a cracked lcd.

Well, the one I bought that was listed as having a cracked lcd actually didn't have a cracked screen at all and it is the phone I'm using now after putting Ubuntu Touch on it.

The other phone however is hard bricked as holding either volume and power at the same time does absolutely nothing. The only way to get any response from the phone at all is to plug it in and the only thing you see is the charge indicator come on the screen(well also the charge LED comes on I think so both the screen animation of the battery charging plus the LED). Holding down power alone does nothing, nor doing it along with volume buttons.

So my question is this. I've watched a few tutorial online explaining how to unbrick in this situation where they advise you to download some files on the internet, one called "color.zip" I think and a couple others. And run a program on a windows machine. Is this method legit or will I be putting malware on my computer if I do this? And if so what is the trusted site I should use for this?

@ubangel92 Are you getting a charging indicator on the screen or anything? I would inspect the port on the phone to make sure you don't have trash built up inside it, or other issues. I would look closely with a jeweler's loupe or magnifying glass. I had similar sounding issues with my last phone I had and cleaning the charge port out with a toothbrush fixed it.

@rocket2nfinity Not sure if by Verizon forwarding if you mean the messages that went thru as "Chats" or something different. As far as I know though I am having no other issues I had people at work today send me messages and they all went thru, and the day before I had my wife go into where she messaged me and changed the options to "Only send as SMS or MMS", then she sent a message and it went thru to me. I was wondering if for that "Chats" feature through the messages we both had to be on the same service(straight talk) or required the same towers(Verizon) as both our phones previously worked on verizon towers, as I know because if I sent a text to an email address it came through as "mynumber@vtext.com"(with my old phone prior to the one I have now).

I'm just still stumped as to why I can't send a text to an email now however because I could even do that back when I had flip phones. But now when I try to send a test message to an email address of mine it doesn't go thru, it fails. I know with this phone I should be on AT&T towers I guess and maybe that is the issue as I found another forum were people were having issues with text to email and vice versa with AT&T but I'm not sure if that is the issue or not.

I'm not sure if the question I'm about to ask has anything to do with ubuntu/oneplus one phone or more related to my service. Me and my wife both have straight talk. We both previously had android phones prior to me swapping to oneplus one with ubuntu. Back when we had android and we texted each other it would always send them as chats most of the time, not sms or mms. That whole thing was new to me after getting the android phones as I was used to them always being sms or mms. Sometimes I would try to send my wife a message and it wouldn't go through then it gave me the option to switch to sms instead and I would do that and it would go through, but most of the time they always went through as chats. Well now that I have the oneplus one with ubuntu I sent her a message and it went through fine. She sent me a message and she said it showed sent on her android phone, which it did but I never received it. I found the option in her phone to always send as sms/mms messages and then she resent a message to me and it went through that time I received the message. Is this an issue with my phone or am I just not supposed to be able to receive messages as chats? My only concern would be other people that I've sent messages to that may have replied and I haven't got their message because of this.

Not sure if this is related but every other phone I've had when I sent a message from my phone to an email address it would always work, and would come to my email address as something like mynumber@altel.com , mynumber@verizontext.com or something similar I can't remember exactly but I tried sending myself a text message from my phone to my email address and it doesn't go through, and was wondering if this would be related to the same issue having with chats in text messages or something entirely different.

Thanks in advance.

@keneda Thank you for the heads up. How often should I check, I know I'm still good for now though just checked and it still has the hosts file I swapped.