Following up on my pledge
to never buy routers that are not supported by OpenWRT, FreeWRT, or similar
Free Software projects, I wish the same could be done for mobile
phones, but I am not yet sure how.
Mobile phones suffer more from shitty software than many other
devices, and their flaws are more painful because we interact with
them so much. Recently, I wrote about the Hell'O'Moto that I found myself in when buying a
Motorola phone. That is a mistake I certainly won't repeat anytime
soon -- usually it takes me between 7.5 and 15 years to maybe give
such companies another chance.
So I am actually looking into mobile phones again, trying to figure
out what to get. While I decided to try Motorola because I was not
willing to spend my money on supporting Nokias pro-software patent
policy, I now found myself wondering whether to consider their E70
phone. It does have nice hardware design and -- unlike the Blackberry,
for instance -- does not seem exclusively designed to make people
dependent on Microsoft Windows.
So I was rather interested when The Register
put online a review of the Nokia E70. The review starts very
favorably with the hardware, including the battery lifetime, and then
comes to the software. Here is what Andrew Orlowski had to say about
it:
A special circle of Hell needs to be created for the souls behind
Nokia's new web browser. [...] The kindest thing to say is that it
makes for a great demo, showing off stamp-sized portions of full web
pages in their glorious colour.
But it's strictly for show. Web, as the browser's called, may as well
have been designed by people who have spent the past few years in a
time capsule, having only partial descriptions of the web fed through
to them in an ancient and forgotten language, with no Rosetta Stone to
help.
So it appears that Motorola does not have the monopoly to put its
customers into software-induced hell. It seems that once more
perfectly good hardware design is invalidated by bad software, which
is all the more infuriating considering that in general we could
fix this, if they'd let us! But in most cases they try to prevent
or at least discourage this from happening -- and are not cooperative
with people who try to make their products better, effectively helping
them to sell more of them.
And by the way, Mr Orlowski, by making it better I did not mean
that I wanted to put the proprietary Opera Browser on there that you
seem to like so much and that I got the impression you were
advertising for quite heavily in your article. I would definitely
choose Free Software, and Free Software only. Just so you know. :)
