Testing
My mother has a little android cellphone that she’s not using because she finds the battery life to be terrible, so she’s loaned it to me to test it out.
On the plus side, it takes better low-light pictures than the Samsung I’ve got, but that’s about all that I can say in favor of it. On the negative side it’s got a traditional Unix/Linux style GUI, which you will not be surprised to know that I think is terrible, and, to make matters worse, it’s close to impossible to do file transfer across wireless (it has bluetooth, but I can’t browse it from other machines without, apparently, writing or purchasing a bluetooth server app, and it’s got wifi, but no ftp or ssh server.) I was trying to figure out about how to do bluetooth browsing and checked online, only to find literally hundreds of links to various fora where people were saying “heeeeeellllp! I can’t browse/download/upload from this thing!” with no useful advise in reply except the occasional “well, you should purchase \
One recommendation for file transfer is that you pull the SD card out of the machine and physically carry that over to the host computer. Oy. Now that’s a simple practical solution that I would have applauded back in the days when I was running SLS on a 0.99 kernel, but now that the Linux world has accreted, Katamari Damacy-style, layers and layers of Open Source®©™ cruft I expect to see a user interface that’s at least as good as the clunky horrible one that comes on my Samsung phone (In my dreams I’d expect to see one like MacOS, but consistant user interfaces don’t gather nearly as much whuffie as redesigning entire subsystems from scratch because the previous one had two pixels out of place.)
Maybe I could root the thing and replace the gui with a curses-based one that emulates UCSD Pascal. At least then it would be more usable, instead of the current click, swipe, swipe, click that’s needed to get to the telephone screen or photo program (or the click, swipe, swipe, click, click, swipe, click×N, click, and thumbtwiddling that’s needed to get photos off the stupid thing.)