Look back in sorrow. Modern tech's cool, but many things used to be so very much better than now.

[liam_on_linux]

I love my Android phone in some ways - what it can do is wonderful. The formfactor of my Nokia E90 was better in every single way, though. Give the Nokia a modern CPU, replace its silly headphone socket, MiniUSB port & Nokia charging port with a standard jack & a MicroUSB, make the internal screen a touchscreen, and I would take your arm off in my

Comments

[steer]

Android -- if you don't like the form factor the same applies if you don't like jabbing sharpened spikes in your eyes -- don't do that then. There's a lot of form factors out there. Fewer if, like me, you want a physical keyboard, but you've still got a heck of a lot of choice... if you're willing to go to a separate PDA and phone solution with tethering then you've got the world of tablets, phablets and combination tablet+keyboard to explore from bargain bucket to costing the earth.

You might hate me for saying this but I think you're moving from being someone who immerses themselves in technology to someone who owns technology. I loved it the first time I had a linux based phone (N900) because I was lying around on a friend's floor trying to get to sleep and some math idea clicked in my head... I wanted to see if it was OK and I remembered that my phone had a python intrepreter on it. Right there I could get a terminal window test it all out, get my program going and try out an idea.

Android and maemo are crazily configurable... you can install weird stuff, if you can be fagged you can put on whatever custom roms and so on.

But the thing is that was the lure of those old PDAs. They were clunkier than an army of robots slam dancing but you could persuade them to do all kinds of things if you dug around a bit. So while they were pretty much shoddy at everything they could do... (unless the task was "produce text file with no formatting" they couldn't word process... unless you clunked them into the harness and installed the software they didn't sync and even then it was super dodgy.) However, just sometimes, with patience and hours of buggering about you could get them to do something special. I remember the first time I managed to coax a palm pilot via an IR connect to a nokia to send an email from the pub. Joyous day. Took about 30 minutes mind but I felt good about it. Not so good I ever sent a second email from it because it really was a royal pain in the arse.

The problem with android (and iOS) is it's all too easy for almost everything they "just work" and that's really not exciting in technology. Want to know the weather, connect to google docs, do some word processing, learn to juggle, sure... there's an app for that. Writing apps is crazily easy... there's just not much that you can do to the phone that people haven't done before.

So I guess my advice is that if you want to really like your android then dicker about with it. Install a new ROM until it breaks and is really flaky... try to persuade it to do things it wasn't meant to. I spent a happy half hour last night getting it to say the word bollocks a user inputted number of times using the android specialised python libraries. It's all a bit clunky and the apps aren't on the app store but you can get a version of python that does daft things to your phone and really play with it. My android freezes solid every few days because the latest firmware I put on makes things a bit smoother but I fiddled with the "don't touch this" options and I can't remember what I changed... but I quite like that.

I may be wrong... but perhaps what you're missing is playing about with the tech for the pure joy of playing about with it. Android and iOS you miss that because everything is laid on, super easy and not a problem so you end up with arguments like "is 'natural scrolling' a pain" (when it's configurable with one click) when previously you'd feel a sense of achievement if you got your mobile device to send a three line email.

[liam_on_linux]

I do want a physical keyboard. I also want a high-spec high-end phone. I can't have both.

I do take your point about customisability, tweakability and so on, although TBH I never did as much of it as you apparently did. But actually, in part, these days, I hanker for something that Just Works. I've spent 30y playing with computers for fun.

To quote "Bad Willow": Bored now.

I want whizzy intelligent C21 gadgets. I do not want Unix and filesystems and mount points and internal versus external storage and partitioning. But that's what I get.

[steer]

If you want whizzy high end gadgets that just work then they'll always be a bit dull because they're ubiquitous. Everyone has them, everyone can work them. You're never going to get the buzz of being the only kid on the block with a toy which can do X. The reason those old school gadgets were cool is that you could make them do stuff "for the first time"... android feels a bit boring because it does pretty much everything ubiquitously well and everyone has one.

Yes, you have prioritised other things over form factor... though to me the specs of the droid 4 aren't sufficiently worse than the note ii that I would have suffered the form factor -- but you make your choice.

[geoffcampbell]

Um, Bluetooth or USB keyboards are supported on pretty much all high-end phones.

GJC

[liam_on_linux]

I did specifically say "integral to the device".

AIH I bought a combo case/keyboard for my Note 2 from eBay. I sent it back; the description lied, it's for a Note, not a Note 2. Different size & shape - doesn't fit.

It was also a quite remarkably nasty keyboard, too, but that's by the bye.

I do not want to have to leave Bluetooth on, or pair it, or charge them separately, and have 2 sets of batteries and twice the weight and two power switches and all that. The keyboard is something I used pretty much *every single time I used the phone*, on my phones with keyboards. Even when idly reading or surfing, I type URLs, I type names & things into search boxes. (Aside: Android 4 removes the search button from the UI, a particularly bizarre and incomprehensible move.)

I've tried Bluetooth and infrared keyboards before - the extra faffing around means I seldom use them, only for long emails and the like. I sold my last one on eBay last year.