61–70 of 110 posts
What is the best option for doing this today, is there an up to date guide somewhere?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both me and my brother had one when it came out and I can honestly say it's the shittiest phone I've had. But this is a matter of ideology.
Care to develop why it was shitty?
Like, tap-the-screne-wait-multiple-seconds slow. Even before the revelation of swipe gesture and smooth 60fps animations on iPhone, it was slow by the standards of its own era. I remember trying to use the phone to type out a quick text and being infuriated. Response time between keypress and UI update was atrocious, and even closing a window took well over a second, if not multiple seconds.
It may have been FOSS-friendly, but it wasn't really a good software stack otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why?
Resistive touch screens is why smart phones never really took off in the main stream before the iPhone (which for some reason introduced capacitive touch screens on smart phones). Basically it is a terrible technology for small devices and barely usable without a pen. The only advantage is with a pen it is actually way more accurate than a capacitive screen allowing for for example handwriting recognition. On my oran…
That's only true of old and crappy resistive screens. The N900's resistive screen works great without a stylus, but the stylus is there if I need ultra-precision, which of course you can't get with a capacitive screen.
The N900's screen doesn't support multi touch, although even multi touch resistive screens are technically possible: http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/19/stantums-mind-blowing-mul...
Even if this does actually get legs, what's next?
It looks thick. I don't know why, but it makes me not at all interested. Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? I'm genuinely curious, I don't know much about the N900.
There is no argument for feelings but is there really any practical advantage to thinness, past a certain obvious point when it allows something to fit in one's pocket? It isn't blue, soft or delicious either. :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to realize the timeframe that N900 was released: 2009. Back then, it was way ahead of most other smartphones (including iPhone), and had multitasking to boot. The resolution was touted as "better than DVD". It had a commandline out of the box, and not some watered down, misplace all the system files version either. It was basically Debian on a phone, with smooth, beautiful graphics, a decent package manageme…
I bought a N900 and it may have been ahead of the iPhone in tech specs but it was way behind in the feel of day-to-day usage. True multitasking could drain the N900's battery in an hour even if the phone was idle. Because the stylus was included many apps required it, so a lot of time was wasted unholstering the stylus. The resistive single-touch screen doesn't support gestures. Maemo didn't support portrait orientat…
I somehow get 1.5-2 days use out of the thing, per charge, despite frequent multitasking (browser, SMS, notes, ssh etc.) and typically running it with a slight overclocking to 805mhz. A script switches on airplane mode while I'm asleep, so that probably helps.
Others have mentioned the screen, but I'm really comfortable reading on it. The Opera browser makes the peck and hunt game on desktop versions of sites obsolete. All the fuss about resistive/capacitive differences is beyond me. It's really quite easy to move (things) about on the screen, and I'm not into splitting hairs.
Some have mentioned the Psion series in this thread. I have to agree, the 5MX was a brilliant design for a mobile device. If that keyboard was coupled with modern, open HW in a similar phone it would be game over. For me at least.
I have been considering buying a folding bluetooth keyboard to type up notes and posts on the phone, but I think that's pushing it - my main 'creation' work still happens on the PC, for better or worse.
I don't do a lot on it that you can't do on any other phone, but it does give me a warm feeling that it's at least open and not phoning home at the end of the day to update Sauron.
It looks thick. I don't know why, but it makes me not at all interested. Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? I'm genuinely curious, I don't know much about the N900.
It allows for bigger batteries, hardware keyboards, additional connectors & storage, etc.
---
I can't speak for everyone: but the pockets in my wardrobe had no problem accommodating feature-phones from pre-2007.
What my pants and shirt pockets can't accommodate are 4.5"+ 1080p displays, regardless of how thin they are.
I will gladly buy a bulkier phone if they make good use of the extra space.
Any indication of how much one of these might cost?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has a keyboard. That makes it infinitely more interesting to me than a Nexus 4. I bet a lot of (former) N900 users will agree. While I never used an N900, I've used phones with and without keyboards over the past few years, and I'm not settling for a touch-only device. There's also more and more of the base Android apps that are abandoned in favour of closed-source, Google branded apps. So there's that as well.
Yes, but it's a 3 row keyboard. I upgraded from the G1 (5 row qwerty) to the G2 (4 row, numbers-on-the-qwerty-row) and it's next to useless. As a phone, I need to use the number line a lot. As a computer /terminal, I need to use letters, numbers & symbols a lot. 3 and 4 row keyboards are bad for both of these use cases. If someone makes a decent, interesting 5-row qwerty phone, I will buy it tomorrow.
If you're in the US and are on a CDMA network, there's the DROID 4/Photon Q for Verizon and Sprint, respectively.
Outside of that I'm not aware of any recent phones with a keyboard, unfortunately.