On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/1/4 William Kenworthy <bi...@iinet.net.au>: > > Nokia n900 - probably the best choice at this time. > > Probably, but to be more precise "not yet" instead of "at this time". > It's the only one that seems to have realistic possibility of some day > having a free distribution running with all features enabled. But it's > not today, and it remains to be seen how active the community around > it is. > > Depends a bit on how you define 'free'... I interact with a phone mostly as a user, and possibly as a app developer - so for me if I can run free software on it, and I can develop free software for it using free tools, it's 'free enough'... I really want a device that I can use as a phone, and a hand-held linux box. The FR does the hand-held linux box part very well, but not so much the phone part. I've been using my FR for 1.5 years, as my primary phone for a lot of that time(on QtEI and the more recently shr-u), and I must admit I'm getting more and more frustrated with it - between the regular crashes and hangs, the incredibly slow performance (so slow that I still occasionally miss a call because I can't unlock the phone in time to answer it), the horrible GPRS performance, and the various idiosyncracies (like the recent 'feature' to progressively dim the screen while I'm trying to use it, inability to connect to wifi much of the time, etc.)... There have been improvements, but it's been very slow, and IMO we're still a *long* way from having a phone with even a half-decent user experience... and there is nothing we can do can fix issues like the poor glamo bandwidth, and the crappy GPRS performance. When I'm out of the house and need to look something up on the web, I borrow my wife's Iphone - I can look up what I need before the FR's browser finishes launching, let alone loading the google homepage... Unfortunately, I've been actively looking for a device lately to replace my FR - I'm just too fed up with it. The N900 is currently my leading contender. I had originally written it off, because it doesn't support the 3G data frequencies currently available here in Montreal - but I realized the other day that it's 'fallback' data support is EDGE, not GPRS. The *fallback* on this phone is still 20x to 50x faster than the best data tranfer rate I can get on the FR... And to be blunt, I don't give a damn if the battery loading software isn't open... As long as it's a linux stack, and it's easy to cross-compile the app software I want for it, using the standard open source libs I'm familiar with --- that's free enough... So long, and thanks for all the fish... Warren -- Warren Baird - Photographer and Digital Artist http://www.synergisticimages.ca
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