Replicant

Is there anybody working on a better strategy?

What exactly do you suggest we do? There is apparently too little interest in producing our own community devices to make this a short term alternative, even though some of us are trying their best to make it happen. The best we can do in the meantime is to try and pick the most freedom-respecting mainstream devices we can find and liberate them with a free system (and more when possible).

As unfree as the Raspberry pi and its copycats currently are, they are the only reasonable direction forward.
Who's to say that Rpi Foundation would be averse to producing a more FLOSS-friendly design? Has anyone asked?
Manufacturing a 599 EUR GTA04a5 board seems silly when a single-core $25 Rpi and $45 GSM radio can be combined to do the same thing.
First get the software right, then pressure appropriate companies for decent hardware.
But the software has to perform not just so-so on very modest hardware but really great-- and
it therefore must not be Android- nor Qt-based as these are too bloated.

https://www.adafruit.com/products/1963
https://www.adafruit.com/products/2266

Is there not a very small motherboard that you can run in complete freedom
and then attach a modem to it some how?

anything smaller than the Beagle bone?
and just fit this in a case connect to a small screen and problem solved?...

*i know someone who works at what effectively is a embedded computer assembly factory(stuff like pi's and programmable wifi cards)
so i could ask them if they know anything that would be suitable

also if there any possibility in reverse engineering any of the old phones from the 1990's
if not just for fun but also because it would in theory be a lot less work

Paul pointed me to the following: http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
I also just found this: http://www.lowrisc.org/

I believe the people at Adafruit generally suggest using Arduino rather than the pi,
probably because of the overheating issue when the pi is stacked with the TFT, battery, and GSM.
But using Arduino would mean giving up on Linux plus they have very little memory.

Regarding reverse engineering I'm partial to using the $45 GSM radio because presumably it is
FCC approved, and lately the FCC is talking about banning user installed Linux if it has control of a radio transmitter:
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/31/fcc-introduces-rules-banning-wifi-router-firmware-modification/

The FCC news are terribly sad, we should do everything in our power to make sure something like that never happens!

Otherwise, I don't think there is any interest to put in the Raspberry Pi (it still has a proprietary bootloader) or in making DIY phones out of single-board computers that are not practical solutions for end-users. In the end, I believe it really comes down to producing our own hardware, as I mentioned already.

"I believe it really comes down to producing our own hardware"

1. try to produce something high-end/costly that is powerful enough to run android and support 3d. (The GTA04 approach)
2. try to produce something low-end that is good enough to run a basic OS and UI basic but that is free and private.

the first option has clearly failed because there are not enough people who are willing to spend the large amount of money that it takes to build up an order.
the second option hasn't really been put to the test nor to a vote.

my point is the raspberry pi or Arduino option is the first logical step toward the second option. as you say it is proprietary. it is only a step in a journey.
it serves as a means to support development of the software that would eventually go on to a low-end freedom/privacy respecting phone.

does that make sense now?