Well, as for me, when I had a chance to hold iPhone for a few minutes, it lowered my perception of Apple from “high-quality, somewhat restrictive, expensive” to “overpriced, unpredictable quality”. What their browser did with saving PDFs was one of the things.
I do use a PDA, though—n810 from Nokia (custom GNU/Linux distribution by Nokia inside), I use bluetooth integration with two different (different operators) phones, in many things PDA helps a lot—but iPhone specifically striked me as an overall poor product.
Given that Apple doesn’t allow apps to fix every quirk, even “there is an app for that” doesn’t help. Why would I want a device that doesn’t run OpenOffice/LibreOffice?
Since OpenOffice has not been adapted and is poorly suited for touch screens, your mentioning it (twice) in a conversation about smartphones is more confusing than helpful.
Also, the n810 (which you’ve mentioned twice) is part of a product line that was discontinued about 2 years ago and never sold in large quantities.
(I know about OpenOffice and the n810 because I used Linux for my desktop platform for 17 years.)
Would you please limit your comments from now on to information that can realistically be expected to be useful to the general reader rather than only to people who have already invested heavily in very unusual hardware or software choices? For example, the vast majority of LWers who will buy a smartphone will (for excellent reasons, particularly “network effects”) buy one with a touch interface.
OpenOffice on touch-only device has two goals: first, check that you can actually get complex software (not really optimized for the platform) working without too much hassle; second, just view the files in non-trivial formats with minimal if any editing (well, sorting and searching are not too bad on medium-size devices).
N810 is EOLed, but N9 lacks only keyboard. From the platform side of things it is quite close.
I am not mentioning N810 in top-level comments (because you cannot obtain it with warranty) or first-level replies (because mentions there are seen as related recommendations) - I am only using this to explain my experience and what baseline I compare Apple products to. The post you are answering to is a reply to the claim that “iPhone just works” (which is true not for everyone’s definition of “works”).
On easily rootable Qwerty Android phones (there are some), you can get chroot + vncviewer + vnc server in chroot (and so, whatever software you need from Debian/ARM) without giving up “using Android phone” and access to the popular apps. I am not naming a specific Android Qwerty phone because I haven’t compared currently available such phones to each other and don’t currently use one. (I do know from experience that setting up the system that I described it not hard).
As for network effects.. if you buy a product with network effect being a strong factor, you have found about it not from this post’s comments.
Well, as for me, when I had a chance to hold iPhone for a few minutes, it lowered my perception of Apple from “high-quality, somewhat restrictive, expensive” to “overpriced, unpredictable quality”. What their browser did with saving PDFs was one of the things.
I do use a PDA, though—n810 from Nokia (custom GNU/Linux distribution by Nokia inside), I use bluetooth integration with two different (different operators) phones, in many things PDA helps a lot—but iPhone specifically striked me as an overall poor product.
Given that Apple doesn’t allow apps to fix every quirk, even “there is an app for that” doesn’t help. Why would I want a device that doesn’t run OpenOffice/LibreOffice?
Since OpenOffice has not been adapted and is poorly suited for touch screens, your mentioning it (twice) in a conversation about smartphones is more confusing than helpful.
Also, the n810 (which you’ve mentioned twice) is part of a product line that was discontinued about 2 years ago and never sold in large quantities.
(I know about OpenOffice and the n810 because I used Linux for my desktop platform for 17 years.)
Would you please limit your comments from now on to information that can realistically be expected to be useful to the general reader rather than only to people who have already invested heavily in very unusual hardware or software choices? For example, the vast majority of LWers who will buy a smartphone will (for excellent reasons, particularly “network effects”) buy one with a touch interface.
OpenOffice on touch-only device has two goals: first, check that you can actually get complex software (not really optimized for the platform) working without too much hassle; second, just view the files in non-trivial formats with minimal if any editing (well, sorting and searching are not too bad on medium-size devices).
N810 is EOLed, but N9 lacks only keyboard. From the platform side of things it is quite close.
I am not mentioning N810 in top-level comments (because you cannot obtain it with warranty) or first-level replies (because mentions there are seen as related recommendations) - I am only using this to explain my experience and what baseline I compare Apple products to. The post you are answering to is a reply to the claim that “iPhone just works” (which is true not for everyone’s definition of “works”).
On easily rootable Qwerty Android phones (there are some), you can get chroot + vncviewer + vnc server in chroot (and so, whatever software you need from Debian/ARM) without giving up “using Android phone” and access to the popular apps. I am not naming a specific Android Qwerty phone because I haven’t compared currently available such phones to each other and don’t currently use one. (I do know from experience that setting up the system that I described it not hard).
As for network effects.. if you buy a product with network effect being a strong factor, you have found about it not from this post’s comments.