Monday, July 20, 2009

Free of the FreeRunner

I've given up on trying to use the FreeRunner as an "every-day phone". There aren't enough buttons to support Android properly. Suspect/Resume support (vital on a power-limited device like a cellphone!) was always touchy. It was just all a bit too unfriendly.

So I bought a G1 from a friend-of-a-friend for cheap and unlocked it to work on my current provider. It's been fun! ConnectBot gives me an 80x22 ssh session anywhere - that's only 3 lines from the size of the standard PC text console that I spent so many of my teenage years in front of. The dev environment is open enough that I experimented with writing my own game - a falling-blocks game called Polyfallminoes. Contacts sync with google, the browser is fine to read ebooks on (I read html ebooks that I buy from webscriptions.net and host on my own server), and in general it acts like a nice polished platform. Not that things aren't missing, because they are... but I'm going to see what I can do about fixing that :)