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

[augeas]

We've a hidden wireless network at home. The crappy Elonex 'droid 2.3 tablet I got a help with the app I'm still not writing saw it just fine. New Samsung Tab 7.0 denies all knowledge. That's progress. I've actually ordered a Nokia 808, maybe next year I'll see if Tizen turns out hideous.

[liam_on_linux]

Ah, yes, you are a serious Symbian fan, aren't you? As such, yes, that is the last and best Symbian phone that I fear there will ever be.

I have not devoted a lot of attention to the development of the Nokia OS family of late, but from what I know, there doesn't seem to be much interest in Tizen; there is more in Jolla and Sailfish.

I am hoping that Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet are at least minor successes; they run on top of the Android base, meaning that it's easy for manufacturers to port them to new hardware - once you have Android running, you're done. The kernel-and-drivers layer is the same. I believe that Jolla want to piggy-back onto this as well. This strikes me as a more realistic prospect than the whole-stack approach of Tizen.

But I do not know a lot about this, and of course I could be all wrong.

(As several here will doubtless say I am about the entire discussion.)

[geoffcampbell]

I believe Samsung have committed to producing some Tizen phones. We do suddenly have rather a lot of choice in phone OSs, don't we?

GJC

[uon]

O tempora o mores!

Worse is better.

--
Sent from my iPhone

[liam_on_linux]

"Worse is better". Ain't that the truth. That is the core of it all, indeed. That comment, that talk, that mindset.

I'm still not convinced.

[uon]

Convinced about what? To quote from Richard Gabriel's essay:

However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach
..that is to say: it doesn't matter what you, or anyone, thinks is good or bad. It doesn't matter how "good" or "bad" a given design of software or hardware is; what determines whether or not it's around in a decade or four are its survival characteristics, which are a very different sort of thing. Your optic nerve is plugged in backwards, in an unbelievably stupid manner that results in you having a blind spot in each eye, but it just so happens that evolutionarily this isn't such a big deal. Intel CPUs or TCP/IP or UNIX are all ugly as sin in some ways, but they just happened to do the right things for the right people at the right time. Look on the bright side: at least the popular smartphone OSes are unix derivatives rather than zombie grandchildren

[liam_on_linux]

I think that this, #83 I think, is the most insightful comment of the whole lot. (Sorry Geoff, Richard

[steer]

Oh... I accidentally booted into Unity today. It doesn't seem to do what you say at all when you press the Windows key. You get up the text search and a small row of icons -- not a screen tiled with them but just 6 or 7. This is on a guest account I've not buggered with so should be default behaviour. It's not like the android "tile the screen with all my apps" button.

[liam_on_linux]

Odd. Perhaps it depends on version and degree of prior use. I get 3 rows of 6 icons: Recent Apps, Recent Files and Downloads. Next to each is a a "more results" link with the number of hits - 17, 8, 19, respectively.

But I would probably have to agree that GNOME 3's win-key screen is better. I just find the overall "desktop" of GNOME 3 irritating - the largely-useless, garish top panel; the fairly useless launcher with a visual effect for already-running apps that's so subtle that I entirely missed it until it was pointed out to me; the lack of app-launch menus; the nonexistent support for 2nd screens; the invisible bottom bar where an invisible control collects up all your notifications.

G3 is more bad than good, but it does have good aspects. I would like a merger of Unity and G3 - the Unity Dock (I mean Launcher) plus panel and desktop, but the G3 win-key overview screen and the G3 virtual-desktop switcher.

[steer]

Well, this is a "new user" but there's just one row of 6 icons. It's the most recent Unity build on a machine with a lot of apps and using a "pristine" guest account.

I had to have the "app already running" on mac pointed out to me as it was quite subtle until you know what to look for -- this was years ago. Not a paradigm I was used to as I was used to "launch new version of this app" and "bring existing instance to foreground" being separated as GUI functions (as it is in most old Unixes, Androd and windows up to win 7).