Smartphones again, can there be one that doesn't have a Major Suckage Point? Pretty please?

Seems like a good place to resume from where I left off just that little while ago.

The LG turned out to be crap with flaky hardware. There were plenty enough comments around the Interwebs for me to know that it wasn't me, it was them. I'm avoiding that company in the future.

Replaced it with a Samsung Droid Charge, that never saw an upgrade past Android 2.3. And that didn't hit until earlier this year. Oh Android fragmentation, how I loathe thee. Especially after reading today about a serious attack vector that is only patched as of 4.3.

Verizon will never update this thing to 4.3. It can't even run the Cyanogenmod ROM which would get me to 4.3. This is because of proprietary bullshit with the radios that no Android dev has been able to reverse engineer. All this closed source nonsense in my open source is like the fly in the soup. Except that you can't pick it out.

If only there was a phone OS that didn't have a Major Suckage Point.

Android - fragmentation, closed source surprises in a platform that's touted as "open", Google's insisting I need to have a G+ account to write app reviews (no, don't have one, don't want one, won't make one), absolutely shitty customer service from some vendors like HTC (you can read tons about the grief people go through who have tried to get a repair / replacement for faulty hardware). I'm wanting to say laggy glitchy performance, but this isn't true on all Android interfaces, and is supposed to be resolved by Jelly Bean. That gets me back to fragmentation.....

iPhone - a walled garden, weird syncing madness you *have* to do with iTunes, falling behind the innovation and hardware power curves, Apples insistence that they know the absolute best thing for users and just swallow it even if you disagree, blaming users for hardware issues (you're holding it wrong), fighting users who want to root their phone (sorry, it's *my* hardware that *I* purchased, I won't have a vendor telling me what I can and cannot install on it).

Windows - another walled garden, less functionality with more restrictions, ugliness & bah Microsoft

All smartphone OS's - tying you into one ecosystem whether you like it or not (Google /Apple / Microsoft account). The desktop is trying to go that route (e.g. needing an Apple Store account to download software for your OSX machine), but it's still not as much heartache to avoid.

I've not included the potential Ubuntu phone, but Canonical is the Apple of the open source world. They also have that "we know what is best for you" mentality. More than that I can't say as I don't know much about the experience of Ubuntu on a phone.


My personal solution is going to be to replace my current phone (only 1.5 years old) with a newer Android that can run stock Android, no vendor or carrier addon crap. Even if Google doesn't roll out updates to my hardware in a timely fashion, I can throw Cyanogen or another ROM on it because it will be built on standards. At that point, I may not be 100% happy with Android, I'll still be tied into the Google ecosystem, but at least I'll have the phone that sucks the least*.





* ... for me. YMMV, get the phone that's right for you, etc etc. Phandroids, iFans and Microsofties all amuse me.

Geeky lazy goodness

Late last year I got myself a laptop to make my schoolwork more portable. Now that I have one I'm seeing just what kind of neat things I can do with it. It's running Mepis Linux 6.5, which mostly "just works". It even has pretty 3D Desktop graphics. :D The only things that don't work perfectly are KPhone (have to figure out how to make it work with bluetooth, see last post about lack of copious spare time) and suspend. Suspend complains that it has a problem with the network card driver rt2500. Two things that I'm sure will be solved when the spare time comes back :D

The vast majority of stuff on the lappy works just fine, including the wireless / bluetooth combo card. This allows me to do stuff I never dreamed about when I was younger (in the electric typewriter days). One night, I was working on the laptop and husband mentioned he saw an interesting interview with Harry Blackstone who plays the main character on the TV series The Dresden Files. It's a very cool series, based on even more cool books by Jim Butcher, about a freelance wizard in Chicago who works for Chicago PD to make ends meet. From the comfort of the recliner, I brought up the site and viewed the videos while Dan & Georgia (roomie) looked on. Multimedia over a wireless connection, with the feet up. Life is good. I'm thinking that now we can also do things like catch TV shows we missed from their websites (where such a thing exists). Of course, eventually we'll have a DVR for the missed shows, but for now this is kewel.