resurecting my old thread here...

So, I tried Android. Cybernav, 10" SuperTab, A knock-off of a knock-off YinLips Android gameboy emulator thing (for my kid), and an Android smartphone for the wife. They all suck.

Okay, the Cybernav does gps really well, and it works great for what I wanted it for... mounting on the handlebars of my on/off road motorcycle. Custom maps, it's amazing really - and it still works after a couple of riding seasons. My 3 year old kid loves the YinLips, but he'd use anything with a touch screen that plays Angry Birds, or anything for that matter. My wife doesn't use her smartphone much, but doesn't want to give it up either. And my 10" SuperTab is kinda/sorta useful, but not really. Too big to carry; needs a keyboard to be useful, and then I'd rather be using a laptop.

All the while I've been playing with the above, I've been a daily user of my N810... It's just there, doing what I want, still. The more I've learned about Android, the more I like my N810.

But, in the interest of sharing my oddysey through the world of Android, here's what I've learned:

Android, as a operating system, is... not good. Weird things just keep getting in the way. I kept at it, thinking it was a Windows user trying to deal with OSX kind of thing, just not seeing the big button that will do what you need, though maybe not the way you want it. But, no, Android is just not very good.

I'm a "the OS is there to let you run applications" kind of guy, so the above isn't that big a deal. I'll deal with a clunky OS to get the app I want running. And, yes, there's a certain amount of App-Envy coming from Maemo, but not as much as you'd think, and it goes both ways.

In Android, the wealth of mapping apps is amazing (I settled on Orux) and there are other things like WiFi Analyzer, and Google Calendar is enough to make an N810 user cry. But, no Xournal. That one caught me by surprise. No Xournal? Yes, there are PDF annotators (not as good) that take what you write and put it somewhere I've not found, in some special format only they know about, and it stays there, unless you pay. Then, there are the advertisements - even with some of the GPL'd stuff. Oddly enough, a lot of what I found lacking in the N810 (something like Abiword for example) is also lacking in Android.

I had an issue with my Cybernav... it didn't like being reformatted to a Linux USB startup disk (don't ask... very dumb day). It took me about 2 weeks of research to get it back to factory trim (no, a reflash didn't fix it, not at all). Mostly, it was just a learning curve... didn't mind that, but what I learned about Android fragmentation makes all the Linux distros look positively cohesive. "Android" is a mess, and a closed mess to boot.

Hardware wise... the N810 has a lousy GPS, a pathetic camera that's so bad the lack of an app to work it is irrelevant, a decent screen, and a great keyboard. I hate on-screen keyboards. It also has a decent OS and quite a few decent apps.

Overall, I can't believe another year has gone by and I'm still in exactly the same place I was. I'm using an even more obsolete, underpowered, and unsupported N810... and I still can't find anything I'd rather use.

So, I've dug Phil's N810 out of the drawer, figured out how to boot off the external SD card, got the built-in SIP client to work with CallCentric, figured out I can use pop instead of IMAP to read Google mail via the built-in email client, and am re-evaluating all the available apps. I'll keep posting the steps I go through, and the fixes I find, until I happen along a pocket-sized linux computer with a hardware keyboard that makes me want to switch.

David...