On 02/04/2008, at 10:34 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
I can't possibly understand why you'd want to run Linux on an iPhone.
The reason why one buys an iPhone is for the UI, not the device;
there's better options out there if you're wanting to run Linux (no
removable storage, for one).
I can see why. A lot of people like the iPhone hardware, but prefer
to run
free software.
I can totally understand the want to run free software; hell, I've
been actively seeking an open source phone for over 5 years now and
still don't have one, despite it looking constantly like there'll be
one coming out right around the corner Anytime Soon now.
My point is there's better hardware out there if you want to do this
than the iPhone! The thing is 2G, doesn't even have removable memory,
and the battery life, while bad, isn't as good as a bunch of the
Windows Mobile devices I've seen.
Multitouch is rad, but it's only useful once you've designed a UI
around it conceptually. You need more than just interfacing to the
hardware.
[*] S60 (Nokia's GUI for Symbian) can be a pain from a developer's
perspective, but it's a very nice mobile OS for the end-user
I wouldn't call it 'nice', but I consider it probably the best
tradeoff mobile OS at the moment. Let's face it; they all suck in
some way or other currently!
My current phones are a combination of an iPhone for normal phone
usage and mobile media, and a e61i for email/ssh/web/GPS (Nokia 3G/
UTMS phone with a QWERTY keyboard, best I've used on any mobile
device). I'm relatively happy with this but wish I could combine it
into the one device.
I'll never own a damn Windows Mobile device again, after owning a
handful of them (including WM6 devices; I've owned more phones than I
care to remember!). I remember posting on SLUG a couple of years back
that they weren't so bad; can anybody say delusional?
R
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