Thread: Will One Device Rule Them All... Or Not
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Old 11-21-2010, 12:30 AM   #63
Gwen Morse
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Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.Gwen Morse never is beset by a damp, drizzly November in his or her soul.
 
Posts: 254
Karma: 59872
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: New York, USA
Device: Kindle 3 (wifi) + nokia n900 tablet phone
Quote:
Originally Posted by CyGuy View Post
I will agree that the modern phone OS is very capable, and usually very fast. However, the biggest limitation is actually the fact they can so easily lock them down. They can decide what applications you can or can’t install. They can easily determine what content you can or can’t get onto the device, and they can decide how the content is delivered. There are many other examples, but my point is that these limitations are designed-in, and are completely unacceptable. A full-blown OS device works like it should. You can copy/paste content at will, to/from the device. You can install software of your choice, from anywhere you decide to get it from.
The difference is simply this: either they decide for you, or you decide for yourself. I will decide for myself...
I'm enjoying the benefits of a full OS on my new phone...the nokia n900. The model itself is about a year old, but I bought mine a few weeks ago.

Before that I was using an Android Milestone, which is the original Droid made for Europe with a GSM SIM card slot so I could use it on TMobile. It's a beautiful phone, very sturdy and well made. I'm just sick of trying to work around the fact that Motorola locked down the firmware which makes it really hard to installl custom ROMs.

I bought the Nokia because it runs Maemo, which is a full Linux operating system. Out of the box, I can do whatever I want with this phone, and I have the benefits of decades of Linux development history to chose from.

It's actually a pretty good phone, too (which is *not* something you can say about every smartphone). The volume is nice and loud (as is the speaker phone) and I don't have much of an issue with dropped calls. It also has a fantastic built-in SIP package, so I can make free calls over 3G that don't use my cellular minutes.

It has an ebook reader, the full-featured version of FBReader. It even has a TTS program to read ebooks out loud. The voice quality isn't as good even as the Kindle, but I also haven't taken any time to fiddle with the settings.

The screen isn't bad for reading, although it's obviously much smaller than a Kindle . The screen is trans-reflective so it's usable in sunlight. I still prefer my Kindle, especially since there's no Kindle for Linux app.

But, walking around with a real (if small) personal computer in my pocket really increases my range of options.
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