Remember in the '90s when Windows CE "laptops" that were basically just the equivalent of a Palm Pilot with a giant screen were selling for the same price as laptops? Yes, you could pay $1,000 for a machine with:
"Pocket" Outlook "Pocket" Office "Pocket" IE 8 or 16MB of built-in storage, with few, if any, additional storage options A tiny-ass MIPS CPU A 640x480 (if you were lucky) passive matrix screen that was barely legible
Of course, none of the applications actually worked—
"Pocket" Outlook couldn't connect to 90% of infrastructure servers "Pocket" Office was basically just "plain text with bold and italic" and couldn't open any Office documents with even 10% fidelity "Pocket" IE required that you drop another $200 on a WiFi card and then wouldn't render any modern (post-HTML 3.0) web pages anyway
And all were slow as sin, and there was precious little in the way of additional applications of any kind, because the machines were so underpowered vs. laptops running full Windows, developer support sucked, and there was no market for apps anyway—not to mention that if you did happen to sell an app to a consumer, they had to go through the convoluted process of installing the CD on their PC first, then plugging their CE device into the serial port of their PC and doing an (always unstable and failing in non-transparent ways) "activesync."
And yet Microsoft kept the "Windows" brand on the CE devices and intentionally marketed them as roughly equivalent to a laptop only lighter and with much longer battery life, OMG!
I had more than one acquaintance come to me asking for help with their new "laptop" only to find that the problem was that their new "laptop" was a CE device they'd been duped into buying, and while it was incredibly light (for its time) and had massive battery life (for its time), it couldn't and wasn't meant to, as they'd imagined, actually run all of the software they had on CD on their office shelf.
Decade and a half later, and Microsoft is still playing the same game and has been all of this time, never with any mainstream success.
I've heard people say, "well, gosh, these are corporate devices for vertically integrated workflows, that's the market," but that never explained (nor does it today) how they then end up at big box stores being sold to consumers, and in mass market Microsoft advertising.
if the KDE4-followed-by-GNOME3 debacle had never happened, I'd still be using Linux. Instead, I went to Mac OS, which is where all of the other Linux users I used to know went as well—a group that had steadily been growing for a decade prior to the last 2-3 years.
Now it's too late to close the stable door; the horse is gone.
using anything other than MacOS on the desktop/laptop right now, but as Jobs himself once said, the post-PC era is upon us, and weirdly, that's where Apple is struggling a bit. After a burst of market innovation during the second half of the '00s, they've basically said "pass" the last several product cycles.
My first iPhone absolutely floored me and there was nothing else like it on the market. Same with my first iPad. But early this year I replaced my iPhone 4 with a Samsung Galaxy Note simply for features reasons (large display, widgets) and ended up going with a 7-inch Galaxy Tab rather than an iPad mini because the Galaxy tab can be had for less than half the price but offers "good enough, similar enough" functionality to the iPad Mini for me.
If Apple wants to stay on top of the post-PC game, they're going to have to:
(1) Tackle the mid-level market more directly or at least differentiate themselves from it, and (2) Pay attention to the features that the market is paying for
I'm a big believer in Apple quality and Apple design, and in the Apple ecosystem, so it's a bad sign that right now (a) there is no iPhone that I prefer to this hunk-of-junk Android phone whose quality pales in comparison, and (b) the price difference in other lines is so significant (more than 2x — $180 for a Galaxy Tab w/40GB and higher display density but just-as-good build quality out the door at retail, vs. $350 for an iPad Mini w/16gb) that I just can't justify the Apple premium.
And I don't just mean "indie obscurity." I can watch Apocalypse Now or The Last Emperor over and over again and appreciate each in a new way every time. There are dozens of others that I feel the same way about. The first Star Wars trilogy. The first Indiana Jones films. Doctor Zhivago. Lawrence of Arabia. Even The Ten fucking Commandments—and I say that as an atheist that hates Charlton Heston (just to prove that it's not about subject matter, or star power).
But (to recall another recent/. story), every time I go to a film lately, I feel as though I've already seen the film two dozen times, with characters carrying slightly different guns, wearing a slightly different-colored superhero suit, etc. Informal film discussion with my wife after the screening has turned from in-depth discussion and debate into "slightly better than Spiderman, slightly worse than Iron Man," followed by "yup, agree."
We shouldn't be able to make easy linear comparisons like that that seem to offer no further opening for discussion.
It's not even that Hollywood won't "take risks" any longer—they've just fallen prey to the same investor-centric disease that the rest of the economy has. A modest film for a modest profit is not good enough. It's "total earth-shaking blockbuster worldwide $1bn potential or bust."
But when every film that gets made is shooting for the "top grossing ever" formula right out of the gate, there's precious little variation or nuance involved. You've got 5 or 10 films to emulate, or even half that number that are the "surest bets."
Nobody goes to a film because they want a "sure bet." If that's what we wanted, we'd just stay home and watch Apocalypse Now one more time (which is precisely what people are doing, I'd bet).
Slashdot is a technology crowd in a "post-technology" world (in that "technology" is increasingly no more than another word for "household appliance"). People here are all about RAID, hot swap, offline backups, rsync, blah, blah, blah. Give me a break. This is precisely why tablets are so successful—they are zero administration devices for the average person that doesn't want to root/configure in the first place.
The average person absolutely STRUGGLES to:
(1) Back up their data (2) Access it anywhere (3) Simply copy a file (4) Share any non-Facebook file format with their friends
Dropbox does all of these things in a point/click way.
People here are talking SANs and SSDs. Seriously? Momma don't do dat. And her hard drive ("computer") has "crashed" more than once by now, 20-30 years after the dawn of the computing age, and she lost her prized photos and recipes. And Slashdotters dutifully told her to "back her data up, then." Which she didn't do because (a) she doesn't know how, no matter how many times you explain it or tell her to go get a Costco USB drive, and (b) she doesn't want to spend time on or think about that even once, much less once a week.
Services like Dropbox are going to own the data storage market.
People above seem to be predicting that hard drives of some new sort are the wave of the future—everything old is new again. I'll boldly predict the opposite: Dropbox is right. In five years, the average person will own zero large hard drives. Their devices (tablets, netbooks) will have enough local storage to boot an OS. Everything else will be in the SaaS (software as a service, storage as a service) space.
Mark it down and come after me if it doesn't happen.
That's the main problem. I would still shell out to see a big screen rendition of Blade Runner, or Apocalypse Now, or even half of the Hitchcock canon, or even some of the (non-animated, mid-century) Disney canon.
But every film now has the sheen of sameness about it and just isn't worth the cash. They're spending more and more, and meanwhile I want to spend less and less. I spent *a lot* of dough putting together a home theater so that I could see some classic greats. The last several times we shelled out for the theater for myself and my wife, I left thinking that I could have spent that $30-$40 much better elsewhere.
This article seems to suggest that B&N is half right with their move to get out of the tablet business—they should be getting out of the hardware business altogether and focusing on just selling ebooks.
I tend to agree—I've owned e-ink readers on and off since the original Kindle was released, and I really like e-ink and find that I experience eyestrain reading on tablets or phones—and yet, over the long term, I have to admit that, contrary to my initial expectations, I've ended up selling the e-ink and reading on tablets and phones anyway.
One less device to carry. One device to rule them all. All of that stuff. I have my phone with me all the time anyway; why carry a dedicated reader as well?
Distributing apps on the iOS and Google app stores is much cheaper than trying to run an entire hardware business for dedicated niche devices. General purpose tablet sales are off the chart; B&N would do better to abandon hardware and do what they can to get exclusive ebook relationships with authors and publishers that distribute to apps on smartphones and tablets.
a pack of politicians with some of the historically lowest levels of public regard and trust in the history of their nation, though to be incompetent or crooks by 9 out of 10 individuals.
break something that's working well just to score correctness points, because in free software, "working well" and "correct" are often not only separate quantities, but orthogonal ones.
Rock solid, fast, has all the applications I need (including MS Office suite and Adobe CS), and also has a complete GNU command line environment and toolchain via MacPorts to run all my old handmade codebases and shell scripts.
On top of that, wife uses Win7 and I find it to be cluttered and fiddly—many more clicks to get done most of the common UX tasks (launching an application, changing a setting, enabling a service, etc.)
And on top of that, OS updates do not cost as much, nor do they involve nearly as much change/instability/unpredictability.
I was a SunOS user in the '80s and early '90s, then a Linux user from 1993-2010. In 2010 I switched to MacOS and I think that's where I'll stay until the desktop is dead (which is real soon now).
Hiring and tenure still involve large percentages of faculty that "came up" under the old system, and don't see the problem (don't have time to see the problem) that has emerged in academic publishing culture over the last couple of decades in particular. They don't see work published outside of the big name journals/publishers as "serious" or "academic" for the moment. So young academics wanting to build a career continue to support them and publish in them, as a pragmatic career-building move.
But young academics by and large (at least in my wing of the social sciences) are incredibly jaded about academic publishing and are absolutely willing to shift the culture away from publishing with big journal mills—they just have to get hired, get tenure, and become "the academics of the world" first. Then, as they begin to be the ones making the hiring and tenure decisions, you can bet that as they consider the next crop of youngsters, they won't place the same premium on Springer, Elsevier, et. al. journals.
The publishing mills are not long for the world, and they know it, which is why they're all trying to expand/reshape their product lines, business models, etc. away from straight print content licensing and toward academic SaaS and other similar offerings.
Anyone that has had extensive contact with PeTA or PeTA higher-ups (and in some cases, even on-the-ground activists) without having been a kool-aid drinking member can tell you that there's nothing "weird" about the rabies. There is, however, something beyond "weird" about PeTA.
I've posted about this in the past; it's in my comment history.
Make cool stuff that people want to use. It's not rocket science, it's just that there's so much dead weight in most companies living inside the company bubble with wrongheaded ideas about what the public wants and overvalued MBA degrees that it's rare.
A bit of hard data, a bit of freedom for forward-thinking designers and developers, including the realization that they need to be aggressive, not conservative, update/relaunch products at 2013 speeds (as opposed to 1994 speeds), and embrace things like the mobile ecosystem and social media, a bit of marketing, and Yahoo! could be at the top of the game again.
I have nothing against Yahoo!, just against shitty, decade-outdated products, which is what they've been making/maintaining for some time. Fix the products, make cool stuff, and I'll be happy to use it.
This may be the most useful response I've had yet about the phone.
Unfortunately, it's still within the context of the Android ecosystem. My search on Teh Google for "Blackstar ROM" does not turn up info or a link for the canonical latest version, just a lot of spamsite references that don't tell me what's the latest, who puts the ROM out, etc.
just works, but without the features that I want, vs. the features that I want that just don't work.:-P
I said in a comment in another story that I wish the universe would cough up a marriage of the iOS ecosystem and the Android ecosystem—all of the features, all of the stability.
For very sound empirical reasons, this is unlikely to happen. But good to dream.
And while it's not rebooting, CM10 on the i717 is pretty sweet. But the damned thing needs to work.
When you're on the phone to international clients, you don't want spontaneous reboots and callbacks. It's just not good business.
I need a phone to work. So far, Android is not fitting the bill. But there's another week or two of patience left in me. We'll see how CM10.1 RC1 does, though so far it's laggy as hell.
Sure, it takes a minute or two to actually install a ROM, but the time spent crawling Teh Google just to learn what the Android ecosystem looks like (i.e. that there is something called CyanogenMod, and where to get it, and so on) is expensive. Increases exponentially if you want to look at other ROMs.
People keep saying "try another ROM" and all that kind of stuff, but just finding download links is like playing 'net tag. I don't have (or want to have) the time for this nonsense.
If there was a single source of links that was a portal, not a forum to wade through like XDA, Android would be far ahead of where it is.
was to get the phablet size—it was between an iPad Mini with calls using Talkatone and the Galaxy Note series. I went "small" w/the Note series...but I'm within a week or two of just chucking it on eBay and getting the iPad Mini after all.
in my world. I don't have three hours to spend on my phone during any given fiscal quarter, much less any given day. Maybe I could dedicate three hours a year to phone maintenance, but it's seriously a problem for Android.
I'm using the i717 builds of CM. Just reverted back to CM10.1 RC1 and it seems relatively stable—but the lag is awful.
I switched to Android from iOS earlier this year specifically to get a bigger screen and widgets (Galaxy Note).
The Samsung ROM was horrifically slow and ugly and filled with unremovable apps I didn't want, plus it contacted the AT&T mothership constantly even though I don't use AT&T and the phone is unlocked.
So I downloaded a CM10.1 experimental build. It was guaranteed to spontaneously reboot during the first 5-10 second of any placed or received call.
So I wiped and downgraded to CM10 stable. This one lets me make calls, but randomly reboots at least half a dozen times a day.
My first experience with Android phones (and it has been expensive in terms of learning curve to get rooted/installed) has not been pleasing. Android may be more flexible, offer larger screen devices, and have more active hacking community surrounding it, but first and foremost, I want to be able to rely on my device.
I'm now trying to decide whether to revert back to the Samsung ROM (Jelly Bean was finally just released for the i717 on the 3rd) and see if that restores the stability of the original Samsung ROM (though no doubt it will also restore the ugliness, slowness, and bloat) or try out a CM10.1 nightly...or just sell the device and get another iPhone and jailbreak it, even without widgets and a big screen.
I should say that my experience with cheap-ass Android tablets from China has been much better. They run stock and are stable and fast. But the phone thing is killing me.
Slashdot Mirror
What, exactly, does this mean, and how is it different from my current Android phone and widgets to show me these things on the lockscreen?
Remember in the '90s when Windows CE "laptops" that were basically just the equivalent of a Palm Pilot with a giant screen were selling for the same price as laptops? Yes, you could pay $1,000 for a machine with:
"Pocket" Outlook
"Pocket" Office
"Pocket" IE
8 or 16MB of built-in storage, with few, if any, additional storage options
A tiny-ass MIPS CPU
A 640x480 (if you were lucky) passive matrix screen that was barely legible
Of course, none of the applications actually worked—
"Pocket" Outlook couldn't connect to 90% of infrastructure servers
"Pocket" Office was basically just "plain text with bold and italic" and couldn't open any Office documents with even 10% fidelity
"Pocket" IE required that you drop another $200 on a WiFi card and then wouldn't render any modern (post-HTML 3.0) web pages anyway
And all were slow as sin, and there was precious little in the way of additional applications of any kind, because the machines were so underpowered vs. laptops running full Windows, developer support sucked, and there was no market for apps anyway—not to mention that if you did happen to sell an app to a consumer, they had to go through the convoluted process of installing the CD on their PC first, then plugging their CE device into the serial port of their PC and doing an (always unstable and failing in non-transparent ways) "activesync."
And yet Microsoft kept the "Windows" brand on the CE devices and intentionally marketed them as roughly equivalent to a laptop only lighter and with much longer battery life, OMG!
I had more than one acquaintance come to me asking for help with their new "laptop" only to find that the problem was that their new "laptop" was a CE device they'd been duped into buying, and while it was incredibly light (for its time) and had massive battery life (for its time), it couldn't and wasn't meant to, as they'd imagined, actually run all of the software they had on CD on their office shelf.
Decade and a half later, and Microsoft is still playing the same game and has been all of this time, never with any mainstream success.
I've heard people say, "well, gosh, these are corporate devices for vertically integrated workflows, that's the market," but that never explained (nor does it today) how they then end up at big box stores being sold to consumers, and in mass market Microsoft advertising.
Me, I think Microsoft's just kinda dumb.
if the KDE4-followed-by-GNOME3 debacle had never happened, I'd still be using Linux. Instead, I went to Mac OS, which is where all of the other Linux users I used to know went as well—a group that had steadily been growing for a decade prior to the last 2-3 years.
Now it's too late to close the stable door; the horse is gone.
using anything other than MacOS on the desktop/laptop right now, but as Jobs himself once said, the post-PC era is upon us, and weirdly, that's where Apple is struggling a bit. After a burst of market innovation during the second half of the '00s, they've basically said "pass" the last several product cycles.
My first iPhone absolutely floored me and there was nothing else like it on the market. Same with my first iPad. But early this year I replaced my iPhone 4 with a Samsung Galaxy Note simply for features reasons (large display, widgets) and ended up going with a 7-inch Galaxy Tab rather than an iPad mini because the Galaxy tab can be had for less than half the price but offers "good enough, similar enough" functionality to the iPad Mini for me.
If Apple wants to stay on top of the post-PC game, they're going to have to:
(1) Tackle the mid-level market more directly or at least differentiate themselves from it, and
(2) Pay attention to the features that the market is paying for
I'm a big believer in Apple quality and Apple design, and in the Apple ecosystem, so it's a bad sign that right now (a) there is no iPhone that I prefer to this hunk-of-junk Android phone whose quality pales in comparison, and (b) the price difference in other lines is so significant (more than 2x — $180 for a Galaxy Tab w/40GB and higher display density but just-as-good build quality out the door at retail, vs. $350 for an iPad Mini w/16gb) that I just can't justify the Apple premium.
about another Hollywood story.
Movies that don't suck would be great.
And I don't just mean "indie obscurity." I can watch Apocalypse Now or The Last Emperor over and over again and appreciate each in a new way every time. There are dozens of others that I feel the same way about. The first Star Wars trilogy. The first Indiana Jones films. Doctor Zhivago. Lawrence of Arabia. Even The Ten fucking Commandments—and I say that as an atheist that hates Charlton Heston (just to prove that it's not about subject matter, or star power).
But (to recall another recent /. story), every time I go to a film lately, I feel as though I've already seen the film two dozen times, with characters carrying slightly different guns, wearing a slightly different-colored superhero suit, etc. Informal film discussion with my wife after the screening has turned from in-depth discussion and debate into "slightly better than Spiderman, slightly worse than Iron Man," followed by "yup, agree."
We shouldn't be able to make easy linear comparisons like that that seem to offer no further opening for discussion.
It's not even that Hollywood won't "take risks" any longer—they've just fallen prey to the same investor-centric disease that the rest of the economy has. A modest film for a modest profit is not good enough. It's "total earth-shaking blockbuster worldwide $1bn potential or bust."
But when every film that gets made is shooting for the "top grossing ever" formula right out of the gate, there's precious little variation or nuance involved. You've got 5 or 10 films to emulate, or even half that number that are the "surest bets."
Nobody goes to a film because they want a "sure bet." If that's what we wanted, we'd just stay home and watch Apocalypse Now one more time (which is precisely what people are doing, I'd bet).
Slashdot is a technology crowd in a "post-technology" world (in that "technology" is increasingly no more than another word for "household appliance"). People here are all about RAID, hot swap, offline backups, rsync, blah, blah, blah. Give me a break. This is precisely why tablets are so successful—they are zero administration devices for the average person that doesn't want to root/configure in the first place.
The average person absolutely STRUGGLES to:
(1) Back up their data
(2) Access it anywhere
(3) Simply copy a file
(4) Share any non-Facebook file format with their friends
Dropbox does all of these things in a point/click way.
People here are talking SANs and SSDs. Seriously? Momma don't do dat. And her hard drive ("computer") has "crashed" more than once by now, 20-30 years after the dawn of the computing age, and she lost her prized photos and recipes. And Slashdotters dutifully told her to "back her data up, then." Which she didn't do because (a) she doesn't know how, no matter how many times you explain it or tell her to go get a Costco USB drive, and (b) she doesn't want to spend time on or think about that even once, much less once a week.
Services like Dropbox are going to own the data storage market.
People above seem to be predicting that hard drives of some new sort are the wave of the future—everything old is new again. I'll boldly predict the opposite: Dropbox is right. In five years, the average person will own zero large hard drives. Their devices (tablets, netbooks) will have enough local storage to boot an OS. Everything else will be in the SaaS (software as a service, storage as a service) space.
Mark it down and come after me if it doesn't happen.
That's the main problem. I would still shell out to see a big screen rendition of Blade Runner, or Apocalypse Now, or even half of the Hitchcock canon, or even some of the (non-animated, mid-century) Disney canon.
But every film now has the sheen of sameness about it and just isn't worth the cash. They're spending more and more, and meanwhile I want to spend less and less. I spent *a lot* of dough putting together a home theater so that I could see some classic greats. The last several times we shelled out for the theater for myself and my wife, I left thinking that I could have spent that $30-$40 much better elsewhere.
That's all.
This article seems to suggest that B&N is half right with their move to get out of the tablet business—they should be getting out of the hardware business altogether and focusing on just selling ebooks.
I tend to agree—I've owned e-ink readers on and off since the original Kindle was released, and I really like e-ink and find that I experience eyestrain reading on tablets or phones—and yet, over the long term, I have to admit that, contrary to my initial expectations, I've ended up selling the e-ink and reading on tablets and phones anyway.
One less device to carry. One device to rule them all. All of that stuff. I have my phone with me all the time anyway; why carry a dedicated reader as well?
Distributing apps on the iOS and Google app stores is much cheaper than trying to run an entire hardware business for dedicated niche devices. General purpose tablet sales are off the chart; B&N would do better to abandon hardware and do what they can to get exclusive ebook relationships with authors and publishers that distribute to apps on smartphones and tablets.
a pack of politicians with some of the historically lowest levels of public regard and trust in the history of their nation, though to be incompetent or crooks by 9 out of 10 individuals.
break something that's working well just to score correctness points, because in free software, "working well" and "correct" are often not only separate quantities, but orthogonal ones.
Rock solid, fast, has all the applications I need (including MS Office suite and Adobe CS), and also has a complete GNU command line environment and toolchain via MacPorts to run all my old handmade codebases and shell scripts.
On top of that, wife uses Win7 and I find it to be cluttered and fiddly—many more clicks to get done most of the common UX tasks (launching an application, changing a setting, enabling a service, etc.)
And on top of that, OS updates do not cost as much, nor do they involve nearly as much change/instability/unpredictability.
I was a SunOS user in the '80s and early '90s, then a Linux user from 1993-2010. In 2010 I switched to MacOS and I think that's where I'll stay until the desktop is dead (which is real soon now).
academic culture and the academic generation gap.
Hiring and tenure still involve large percentages of faculty that "came up" under the old system, and don't see the problem (don't have time to see the problem) that has emerged in academic publishing culture over the last couple of decades in particular. They don't see work published outside of the big name journals/publishers as "serious" or "academic" for the moment. So young academics wanting to build a career continue to support them and publish in them, as a pragmatic career-building move.
But young academics by and large (at least in my wing of the social sciences) are incredibly jaded about academic publishing and are absolutely willing to shift the culture away from publishing with big journal mills—they just have to get hired, get tenure, and become "the academics of the world" first. Then, as they begin to be the ones making the hiring and tenure decisions, you can bet that as they consider the next crop of youngsters, they won't place the same premium on Springer, Elsevier, et. al. journals.
The publishing mills are not long for the world, and they know it, which is why they're all trying to expand/reshape their product lines, business models, etc. away from straight print content licensing and toward academic SaaS and other similar offerings.
Anyone that has had extensive contact with PeTA or PeTA higher-ups (and in some cases, even on-the-ground activists) without having been a kool-aid drinking member can tell you that there's nothing "weird" about the rabies. There is, however, something beyond "weird" about PeTA.
I've posted about this in the past; it's in my comment history.
Apple did.
Make cool stuff that people want to use. It's not rocket science, it's just that there's so much dead weight in most companies living inside the company bubble with wrongheaded ideas about what the public wants and overvalued MBA degrees that it's rare.
A bit of hard data, a bit of freedom for forward-thinking designers and developers, including the realization that they need to be aggressive, not conservative, update/relaunch products at 2013 speeds (as opposed to 1994 speeds), and embrace things like the mobile ecosystem and social media, a bit of marketing, and Yahoo! could be at the top of the game again.
I have nothing against Yahoo!, just against shitty, decade-outdated products, which is what they've been making/maintaining for some time. Fix the products, make cool stuff, and I'll be happy to use it.
This may be the most useful response I've had yet about the phone.
Unfortunately, it's still within the context of the Android ecosystem. My search on Teh Google for "Blackstar ROM" does not turn up info or a link for the canonical latest version, just a lot of spamsite references that don't tell me what's the latest, who puts the ROM out, etc.
Got any links?
The random reboots in the supposedly stable CM10 were what really bugged me. Wiped the phone completely, including all caches, etc. before installing.
Sometimes I'd be working at the desk and see it reboot 5 or 6 times over an afternoon, just sitting there. Not good.
Have CM10.1 RC1 installed now, and it hasn't rebooted on me once, but the UI speed is horrible compared to CM10. Blah.
by putting on a bumper, there would be a much greater chance of me keeping it.
As it is, I have a case on it, but it drops calls anyway and I can't even do an immediate callback because for the first minute it's busy booting.
You could make the case that there's a parallel there, but the difference is in the degrees.
just works, but without the features that I want, vs. the features that I want that just don't work. :-P
I said in a comment in another story that I wish the universe would cough up a marriage of the iOS ecosystem and the Android ecosystem—all of the features, all of the stability.
For very sound empirical reasons, this is unlikely to happen. But good to dream.
And while it's not rebooting, CM10 on the i717 is pretty sweet. But the damned thing needs to work.
When you're on the phone to international clients, you don't want spontaneous reboots and callbacks. It's just not good business.
I need a phone to work. So far, Android is not fitting the bill. But there's another week or two of patience left in me. We'll see how CM10.1 RC1 does, though so far it's laggy as hell.
Sure, it takes a minute or two to actually install a ROM, but the time spent crawling Teh Google just to learn what the Android ecosystem looks like (i.e. that there is something called CyanogenMod, and where to get it, and so on) is expensive. Increases exponentially if you want to look at other ROMs.
People keep saying "try another ROM" and all that kind of stuff, but just finding download links is like playing 'net tag. I don't have (or want to have) the time for this nonsense.
If there was a single source of links that was a portal, not a forum to wade through like XDA, Android would be far ahead of where it is.
was to get the phablet size—it was between an iPad Mini with calls using Talkatone and the Galaxy Note series. I went "small" w/the Note series...but I'm within a week or two of just chucking it on eBay and getting the iPad Mini after all.
in my world. I don't have three hours to spend on my phone during any given fiscal quarter, much less any given day. Maybe I could dedicate three hours a year to phone maintenance, but it's seriously a problem for Android.
I'm using the i717 builds of CM. Just reverted back to CM10.1 RC1 and it seems relatively stable—but the lag is awful.
Still not particularly happy w/Android...
I switched to Android from iOS earlier this year specifically to get a bigger screen and widgets (Galaxy Note).
The Samsung ROM was horrifically slow and ugly and filled with unremovable apps I didn't want, plus it contacted the AT&T mothership constantly even though I don't use AT&T and the phone is unlocked.
So I downloaded a CM10.1 experimental build. It was guaranteed to spontaneously reboot during the first 5-10 second of any placed or received call.
So I wiped and downgraded to CM10 stable. This one lets me make calls, but randomly reboots at least half a dozen times a day.
My first experience with Android phones (and it has been expensive in terms of learning curve to get rooted/installed) has not been pleasing. Android may be more flexible, offer larger screen devices, and have more active hacking community surrounding it, but first and foremost, I want to be able to rely on my device.
I'm now trying to decide whether to revert back to the Samsung ROM (Jelly Bean was finally just released for the i717 on the 3rd) and see if that restores the stability of the original Samsung ROM (though no doubt it will also restore the ugliness, slowness, and bloat) or try out a CM10.1 nightly...or just sell the device and get another iPhone and jailbreak it, even without widgets and a big screen.
I should say that my experience with cheap-ass Android tablets from China has been much better. They run stock and are stable and fast. But the phone thing is killing me.
(1) Go to Amazon.com
(2) Search for "Android Tablet"
(3) Buy ICS Android tablet @1GHz/8GB/SD-slot/Dual cameras/7" for $80 or less new
(4) Profit
Bought one for wife, one for each kid. Fast, stable, functional, cheaper than dining out as a family @a diner or casual joint.
Freakishly expensive? Methinks not.