The NexPhone: A $549 Android, Linux, and Windows Device

Nex Computer is best known for their dock that allows you to turn your Android phone into a workstation. But now, 14 years after initially announcing the concept, they are accepting preorders for the NexPhone.

By 2026 standards, the NexPhone has relatively dated specs. The article suggests that the phone is essentially a Fairphone 5, which is over 2 years old and received criticism even at the time (particularly around processor speed), but the company admits they envision this phone acting more as a secondary or backup phone rather than a flagship daily driver. Still, the specs seem - to my uneducated initial comparison to the iPhone 16e - pretty decent in some areas such as memory, camera resolution, and internal storage (which can be expanded via SD card).

The biggest selling point of the NexPhone is that it runs Android, Debian, and Windows 11. It's FOSS says that NexOS is "a bloatware-free and minimal Android 16 system," and that Debian will run "as an app with GPU acceleration." Windows 11 is available via dual-boot.

While I personally find this concept incredibly cool, there are several security considerations. As far as I can tell in my research, NexOS is not source-available and I was unable to find any information about what changes it makes to the Android base (thougn it does claim to run on Android 16) and Debian is not one of the Linux distros we recommend at Privacy Guides for several reasons, security being one of them. It also seems that Nex made at very least some cosmetic changes to Windows 11 to optimize it for mobile, which could potentially introduce new bugs or vulnerabilities.

Should you be willing to accept these risks, the NexPhone is set to ship in Q3 of this year (July-September) and the $199 deposit is refundable.