Google's Buying Out Motorola For 12.5 Billion USD

[RealNC]

Too bad Fujitsu chose Windows 7 instead of a Linux distro for this. It's a phone that runs Windows 7 (not Windows Phone 7, but the Desktop Windows 7):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xo8gslRVHo

[Cyborg16]

b15hop: not sure about the "upgrade wall" and I do hope you recycle your old phones rather than just check them in the bin, but yes, novelty is probably the main reason running a full-blown OS on them isn't so easy. Have you never used a web-store or written notes on a phone?

The big limitation though is input and output. Motorola's atrix with laptop-dock is a simple way of solving that (although pretty pointless since if you're carrying around that much hardware you might as well pack a bigger CPU too). I can see only perhaps two ways phones end up doing more than things which are easy to do on a phone screen: universal docks (where you can just plug your phone into your mate's screen and keyboard) and inovative input devices which for various reasons have never been massively successful so far: chorded, gesture-based or voice input, and head-mounted displays (or maybe even minature projectors).

[V!NCENT]

You serious? I'm waiting for my N900 replacement... package management on maemo sucks. It could work, but somehow the official package manager on the N900 simultaeneously sucks and has compatibility issues with apt-get.

Maybe someday we'll just be able to install debian on phones...

Heh, wait until you meet android; the various forks (all non-stock Android versions) and their versions in combination with all the different HW... It's like praying for your app to work et all! Seriously, experience here. It's like a 50-50 chance anything works correctly, if at all...

You've never used Symbian, have you :P

Heh... I had Symbian before that (twice). It wasn't so flashy as Android, but at least I could make a call after four hours of full use. And let's face it; Opera beats the crap out of Dolphin. The fragmentation of software in Android, the bugs, the fact that sync meant syncing every second (instead of every x mins you can setup with Symbian^3), no good VPN, horrible keyboards, incompatible widgets with other homescreens (oh fast... wait nothing works!), horrible refill bugs, battery and data hungry navigation with Google Maps, horrible this, crashing that...

I know... Symbian^3 is way behind the flashy new HTC Sence and all that stuff, the menu's take a bit of learning (like we didn't always do that before the iPhone came out), but people with brain matter actually thought about what the fsck I want my phone to do:
-Work;
-Not crash;
-Last longer than a half-hour webbrowser session, so I can, you know, make a call?

No I came screaming back to that Symbian(^3) (with way better apps than Android BTW) that has always worked. But enjoy the sexy homescreen effects of Androids...

[Cyborg16]

Hmm, maybe I'll believe you when you learn to spell (and I've tried android myself). They can't be all that bad — although more than 36 hours (about the best I can get out of my N900) battery life would be nice!

[curaga]

@V!NCENT

I agree with those downsides of Android, and add some of my own: requiring a google account to do most things (you too WP7, fsck you for requiring a Live account), no upgrade path if vendor decides so, no way to close apps, unintuitive gestures (you too iPhone; if you've never seen how to do things like pinch-to-zoom, they aren't obvious) and keys (wait, I need to _hold_ that key for several seconds?).

Listing some of my gripes with Symbian: slow, menus lag, boot is slow, shutdown is slow, doing anything is slow. Heck typing a SMS it lags, the phone is the bottleneck in typing. Unintuitive submenus of submenus of submenus - the main deciding characteristic of Symbian, this has always been there in every version. No consistent keys or usage (now how do I get to the apps screen on _this_ phone...). Needing to sign apps, and that used to cost a lot of dosh. It was free for a while after Elop came, but I think it's now back to costing several hundred. No proper way to develop on linux.

[V!NCENT]

Hmm, maybe I'll believe you when you learn to spell (and I've tried android myself).

English is not my native language. Did you experience a crash whilst using it? It's very likely you had one, considering I had that happen to me on a bi-hourly basis with stock Android 2.1 (Motorola XT720). It managed to crash more than Windows 98. Seriously... Google actually managed to make Linux crash more often than Windows 98... And not just with my phone; my dad actually cursed twice as much at his Galaxy S. According to him it was even more horrible than Windows Mobile. That's a serious achievement.

They can't be all that bad — although more than 36 hours (about the best I can get out of my N900) battery life would be nice!

GLHF finding one. Android doesn't have energy saving mode, meaning that in order for Android to even last for 12 hours, you must at least have sync off. You must also digg three menu's deep everytime you want to turn 3G on or off (seriously... WTF?). That either makes Android as much worth as a ten your old phone, or last just 6 hours straight.

Of course at first sight you're like "Wow... that's awesome!", but wait until you find out that you better have a AC adapter with you at all times, or not use any functionality at all.

That makes Android the worst mobile OS on my list, even though Windows Mobile was just as shitty...

[V!NCENT]

@V!NCENT
menus lag, boot is slow, shutdown is slow, doing anything is slow.

Boot time on my Android 2.1 device was 20 seconds, after which it has this Windows desktop effect: wait 20 more seconds before it's responsive. That standard browser is a real pain and I use it for YouTube and Flash websites only. At least Nokia cares and Symbian Anna update (this quarter) will fix it. maybe it helps that I have an E17 (faster CPU).

[Heck typing a SMS it lags, the phone is the bottleneck in typing.

The fullscreen typing is indeed hell, with portrait mode having numeric keypad. But I'm not having these problems because I have a physical keyboard. That update fixes the all the above.

Unintuitive submenus of submenus of submenus

I don't realy care because I had more phones before (going back to those brick sized phones with slide-out antenna's). Also on Nokia's fixlist (might be update after Anna).

- the main deciding characteristic of Symbian, this has always been there in every version.

Network connection decide characteristics? Good for the battery, but don't dare to connect with a faulty WiFi router at home or you're in for a headache until you Google the problem and end up finding out what the problem is.

No consistent keys or usage (now how do I get to the apps screen on _this_ phone...).

That's always been the hang-up-key or the giant iPhone like homekey. What's not to get about that?

Needing to sign apps, and that used to cost a lot of dosh.

From a developer standpoint; Android does win there. But don't dare running your app on a different phone (heh).

No proper way to develop on linux.

Yup. That's why I hope that that Qt Meamo N9 (http://europe.nokia.com/find-product...specifications) fill fix these problems.

[Cyborg16]

The fullscreen typing is indeed hell, with portrait mode having numeric keypad. But I'm not having these problems because I have a physical keyboard. That update fixes the all the above.

Same on N900 virtual keyboard; it's slow to load and buggy (sometimes text typed doesn't come out at all or ends up in the wrong place). But thankfully the N900 has a real keyboard too.

Network connection decide characteristics? Good for the battery, but don't dare to connect with a faulty WiFi router at home or you're in for a headache until you Google the problem and end up finding out what the problem is.

Surprisingly the N900 does alright there. Come home and it picks up the wifi signal quickly, go out and as far as I can tell there's not much difference in battery usage between leaving wifi in standby mode or manually switching it off. It does use power when it's connected though so sometimes I switch it off at home, and then somehow Nokia managed to make it mostly work, but a couple of applications (the program manager/app updator and a weather applet) don't work over wifi without some extra fiddling. Apparently my router is at fault, but I've had the same with more than one router and nothing else has these problems. Oh, but try syncing against google calandar and you're somewhat out of luck: in theory maemo supports MS outlook sync or whatever which works at first, but after a week or two brakes due to a bug in maemo.

That's always been the hang-up-key or the giant iPhone like homekey. What's not to get about that?

It was an extra key with some odd symbol on my old symbian phone; still, I only had to tell people to use that key for apps/menu and they soon got the hang of it. You get used to the sub-menus... sometimes they're a bit of a nuisance but not that bad. Symbian is fine for a basic phone and perhaps calandars in my experience, but still a bit limited.

Yup. That's why I hope that that Qt Meamo N9 (http://europe.nokia.com/find-product...specifications) fill fix these problems.

Well I hope it does. Personally I'm after something with a bit more CPU power (for linux chroot) and just scrounged an atrix off ebay. If the phone functionality's a problem I might just buy a cheap dumbphone and dedicate the atrix to mobile computing instead (with portable keyboard and power supply).

[V!NCENT]

Same on N900 virtual keyboard; it's slow to load and buggy (sometimes text typed doesn't come out at all or ends up in the wrong place). But thankfully the N900 has a real keyboard too.

I'm not having that problem with my phone at all, but had that with Android; some of the text gone missing, sending text messages and half of the text stays there, or ends up missing when I send it.

Surprisingly the N900 does alright there. Come home and it picks up the wifi signal quickly, go out and as far as I can tell there's not much difference in battery usage between leaving wifi in standby mode or manually switching it off. It does use power when it's connected though so sometimes I switch it off at home, and then somehow Nokia managed to make it mostly work, but a couple of applications (the program manager/app updator and a weather applet) don't work over wifi without some extra fiddling. Apparently my router is at fault, but I've had the same with more than one router and nothing else has these problems. Oh, but try syncing against google calandar and you're somewhat out of luck: in theory maemo supports MS outlook sync or whatever which works at first, but after a week or two brakes due to a bug in maemo.

My problem is not the fact that it connects. When trying to trash the connection it kept managing to come back. The problem with my cheap-ass-comes-with-ISP-supscription-router is that it can't do anything but browsing the WWW. Not a single gateway or forwaring app works on it without going through my computer. That was the reason that OVI gateways didn't work, so no navigation lookup at home, no OVI store, no Facebook gateway. Had to delete the router settings and everything started working.

It was an extra key with some odd symbol on my old symbian phone; still, I only had to tell people to use that key for apps/menu and they soon got the hang of it. You get used to the sub-menus... sometimes they're a bit of a nuisance but not that bad. Symbian is fine for a basic phone and perhaps calandars in my experience, but still a bit limited.

After I trashed my WiFi, my experience is that it works fenominally well. The build-in VoIP, VPN, email accounts, internet tv, apps... It's more enabling than Android was for me, but then again it's Symbian^3...

Well I hope it does. Personally I'm after something with a bit more CPU power (for linux chroot) and just scrounged an atrix off ebay. If the phone functionality's a problem I might just buy a cheap dumbphone and dedicate the atrix to mobile computing instead (with portable keyboard and power supply).

Is that an ASuS Transformer thing, but than for a phone instead of a tablet? Looks nice. But I don't see why you'd need a powerful CPU. I can easily type a MSOffice document on the go and send it to my own Gmail, or put it on a USB stick (USB host FTW) or even hook it up to a printer directly. PS: Because of that USB host thing I can also directly hook it up to a Keyboard with a supplied cable and hook my Nokia up to a HDMI monitor...

[Cyborg16]

Is that an ASuS Transformer thing, but than for a phone instead of a tablet? Looks nice. But I don't see why you'd need a powerful CPU. I can easily type a MSOffice document on the go and send it to my own Gmail, or put it on a USB stick (USB host FTW) or even hook it up to a printer directly. PS: Because of that USB host thing I can also directly hook it up to a Keyboard with a supplied cable and hook my Nokia up to a HDMI monitor...

My router has a firewall which might be the reason, but I see no reason to enable it for two apps (one of which is broken anyway: I managed to accidentally run a dist-upgrade via apt-get on the N900, which totally breaks Nokia's program manager — no more updates though, so no point reflashing the thing).

Trust me, I'll use the CPU, but not for office documents. I'd use 4 GB RAM too if I could get it; I use it on my laptop. I do software dev., and compilers, besides some IDEs like kdevelop, are pretty memory hungry.