[Shr-User] Quick e-mail poll: Still using your Freerunner?

[Mihai Donțu]

On Tuesday 29 December 2009 22:30:53 Risto H. Kurppa wrote:
> Do you use FR as your daily/primary phone?

No.

> Do you use FR as your primary PDA?

No.

> What distribution you run most of the time?

I tried android, qtmoko & shr.

> If you don't use FR as your daily phone/PDA, what phone did you change
> over to, and why?
> 

I bought an iphone before the freerunner and I have chosen to stick to the 
iphone until android gets better. There are a number of qualities which are _a 
must_ for me:
 * good keyboard with i18n support;
 * perfectly working phone app;
 * perfectly working contact app;
 * perfectly working SMS app;

On both shr and qtmoko I can not use the keyboard. If I'm going from touching 
the screen (iphone) to using a pen to tap on the screen (shr), the keyboard 
_must_ kick ass. Currently the shr kb is geekish and while I find it 
interesting, I'm not often in the mood for it. On qtmoko I have something like 
three kb-s (mmm ...). I'm not even going to talk about i18n support.

Then comes the way the phone behaves when I'm receiving a call. I totally hate 
it when the ring tone (that 1964 ring bell) stutters. There are so many hints 
you can give to the Linux kernel in order to keep an app "tight" (ie. have all 
its resources close and ready to use), I just don't get why this _still_ 
happens in 2010.

The last thing is related to the buttons used to send shr/qtmoko into standby 
and back. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes I need a 
crystal ball.

Android is the only distro which is extremely close to what I need (and very 
close to what iphone offers). It's just a bit too slow at the moment (I have 
not tested the latest release, with the no-debug kernel).

I'm afraid I do not share your views on what should be free and what not. I'm 
satisfied with what Apple offers me right now (though I'm looking forward to 
buying a Nexus One too). I used to do embedded programming back in the 
Symbian-boom days and now I realize I kind of lost my patience with phones.

-- 
Mihai Donțu