Sunday, May 1, 2011

Why there is no good phones available anymore?

I am stuck. I am stuck with all these mobiles in my life. It seems that there is just no good mobile phone available at the moment, I give you short intro what I currently have and why they are not usable;

iPhone4
  • Missing keyboard
  • painfull ecosystem, I want to copy those MP3's and images without itunes.
  • Multitasking sucks still (I want real Jabber IM client)
Nokia E7
  • Symbian sucks
  • Camera is bad
  • I need wifi accesspoint functionality which does work
  • I have also Nokia N8, which I occasional use because of it's camera. It's so good, but still does not help for other issues (keyboard, symbian, accesspoint functionality).
Android's (HTC Desire Z, Ericsson X10 (&PRO), Samsung 5 and others)
  • Keyboard, yes desire Z has that but it sucks. Android is not designed to support keyboard well enough (yes, that tiny entry field for SMS's for example) and Z's keyboard is really pain if you compare to E7's. And Z's design is not so good.
  • OS is candy, too candy to be usable. Too much complication and somehow cluttered outfit of everything gives me headache.
  • I have done some coding with SDK, which is nice. But conceptually my target is to produce something professional and since I don't know when OS decides to close my tasks things turns again unacceptable. Any clue for me related to this?
Nokia N900
  • This was best as long as it lasted. Elop killed a dream of Meego and successors of this wonderful device. Only disadvantages were battery life and display, which were a bit outdated.
  • SDK functionality could have been lot better, giving users access to all telecommunication api's like android. Why it did not happen, I don't know.
  • Basically this N900 was really exciting device, which gave me and still does some very intuitive UI approaches.
  • IM integration, native Jabber support for corporate security audited IM infra was 10+ for our business, cross platform usage of IM was breeze with this.

So I am juggling between iPhone, Nokia E7/N8/E72 and various Androids, making every night prayers for something like N900 to appear. I seriously checked out Aava's products and other phone hardware to support native Linux because all of this confusion in field. I believe I end up building my phone by myself.

Nokia could have scored with Meego devices, but they ended up to play with evil. How can they believe that we could pay 10k€ for microsoft msdn development stuff to get started, while others offers us open source approach. Think about it.

And yes, seriously I started to follow mr. Jääksi again. I really hope that he gets some air to breath in HP and is able to push something open enough for all of us. Please continue from what you left behind with N900 team.

So, now I am after a good phone at least with these features;
  1. Open, Linux able operating system with decently supported and free SDK and with future proof vendor.
  2. Standard Jabber IM integration (no, gtalk and microsoft communicator are not secure)
  3. Keyboard (Like E7/N900, not like Desire Z
  4. Wifi accesspoint functionality
  5. Easy to connect (USB mass memory storage support, micro SD's etc)
Anyone?

Ubuntu 11.04

Colleague of mine entered in office, and noted my freshly installed Ubuntu 11.04. Linux guys have Christmas more often than others. I like new release, my Thinkpad EDGE and HP Mini, it just rocks. Main desktop is not yet upgraded, because phasing evolution makes it a bit more predictable. I found this new release suffering only this bug, which makes my window manager to freeze from time to time. I tweaked some settings and now it seems to work again. Something related to compiz and kernel. I hope upgrades brings good things for that.

But from unity I switched to classic gnome, not because unity was lacking but somehow I am more productive under familiar gnome. I believe that I go again with unity, by steps.