unlocked... but you still need binary blobs for anything to even work.

why do they litter the earth with that garbage? a low tier phone with no requirement for binary blob drivers would make more impact than that mid tier phone. since that is exactly the same phone i can get if i buy a 2~4 yr old android phone on craigslist. 100% identical outcome.

Who cares about binary firmware blobs? How is that any different than device firmware burned into an EEPROM, written to flash, etched into ROM, etc?

Hardware is full of software. The line you create in the sand is arbitrary.

You have no idea what you're talking.

for example, google nexus devices. They are "open" but the drivers for audio, radio, video, digitizer, etc are not. The chip providers give source to Google but only allow compiled distribution.

So Google makes two versions of Android before ignoring the device. If you want to continue using device with a third version, you either hope that loading same binary drivers work or you reverse engineer them.

As you can imagine, nobody is able to do that for every version, so even though the nexus is open, you will ever only have two versions on Android on each.

Same happens with Firefox phone i had, and will probably happen here because it's a midtier phone. If it was a low tier there were changes they could find some components the manufacturers didn't care about sharing source for drivers.

The line is generally the baseband, which isn't really all that arbitrary, but until someone comes out with an open chip and the resources to get it carrier certified, we're going to have to choose between closed devices or no devices. I'm sticking with closed devices for now.