Having an officially blessed set of repos is a great thing. I guess static compiling would help out, too.

I would love to get an Android phone but its the price tag that puts me off.

I will soon be picking up a T-Mobile Pulse PAYG handset for £137 from their online store. I consider that to be a very low barrier entry.

I have an android phone (Samsung galaxy I5700). I’m using google listen as my podcatcher but I can’t make it subscribe to your rss feed. I keeps saying “Feed could not be fetched” I have tried both http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShotOfJaq http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShotOfJaqOgg No luck. Any tips?

On the subject of iPhone envy. I certainly don’t have it. My girlfriend has had an iPhone for over a year now she has nothing but trouble with it. She’s actually on her fourth physical iPhone, One got lost, one smashed, one the speaker stopped working. She has had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get these problems resolved and in so doing repeatedly lost all her iTunes music, photos and apps.

One of the phones went wrong in a most amusing way. It just incessantly played music at full volume. There was no way to stop it and because Steve Jobs knows better than you, we couldn’t even take the battery out. We buried it in a washing basket and put that under the stairs until the battery ran out.

The phone she has now keeps ‘white screening’ and no app that wasn’t pre-installed will run on it.

Now you might be thinking that my girlfriend is hard on phones. Maybe she is, but she had a Motorola Krazor before that and never had any problems.

With the contract and all, I calculate that the iPhone is costing well over €2,000. Meanwhile my android phone cost €300 (plus about €5 per month for pay as you go credit) and I have already had masses of fun with it. I have also started learning Android development safe in the knowledge that I can publish my program on my website if it is not deemed suitable for the android marketplace.

To say I’m happy with it is an understatement

I would love to be able to sync my mobile phone with my desktop, but I think the only way that is likely to happen any time soon is to store everything on Google apps and use that platform on both my phone and the desktop.

You can be almost completely involved in the process, fixing bugs, etc. Users are the people who decide which programs go through in the repositories (which is great and will be better once there are more users).

For those looking for an n900 without a keyboard, it is already confirmed to be coming out next year without a keyboard and with a capacitive (aka multi-touch) screen.

There’s absolutely nothing to be gained in functionality by providing 64 bit binaries here, only more management headaches.

Of course, I’ve rooted my G1. I have OpenLDAP 2.4.19 running on it. My local slapd syncs to my home server so I have all my addressbook contacts and such. I dunno what you’re talking about, re: no Linux apps ported to it. Porting is pretty much a no-brainer – configure / make / make install / adb push… Really it’s such a non-event that there’s nothing to talk about, which seems to me to be the reason you don’t see more being talked about.

You can use libSDL and port some of your graphics apps over already. I think all that’s missing is open access to the Radio Interface Library, which prevents me from jettisoning all the Android crap and just running everything natively from a regular /etc/init.d…

The G1 hardware has probably more CPU power than my old Win98 mobile Pentium laptop, and a pretty decent GPU as well, but it runs incredibly sluggishly when you try to move from one Android app to another. There’s no reason for it to perform this poorly, and there’s no excuse for it. Me, I no longer use any of the Android apps besides ConnectBot. Everything else I do in a screen session on one of my other servers – finch for IM, mutt for email, etc. etc. – saves memory, saves CPU, saves battery life. The only Android app I use regularly now is Solitaire.

Ultimately I’d like to port the old Bellcore MGR to the G1 and eliminate the rest of the cruft. I don’t need eye-candy on a phone ferchrissake, and the rest of the stuff is just too expensive resource-wise. We can do better than this, and we should.

But I’m far more likely to actually develop applications/tweak/port things in Python than to bother with a tightly-controlled Java environment or learning Objective C.

And what’s worse about the others – Android, Palm, iPhone, is the sense that it’s not really your phone, it’s still controlled by the platform. With Maemo, it’s much more mine–not sending all kinds of stuff back to the mother ship, far less restrictive on what can be installed.

Why so dismissive of Maemo?

Android has yet to make much of an impact here. The G1 is out and I think that’s it. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a Hero here, let alone a Droid. But we’re just a backwater in many respects, unfortunately.

Frankly I think you could put any JavaVM language on Android (with effort) in the same way that you can write Google App Engine apps in lots of JavaVM languages.

I think performance is where the real hit would be and you’d really notice it on a phone. I’ve noticed that my 2004 laptop is struggling with the latest ubuntu releases these days and I wonder sometimes whether the prevalence of python in the desktop is the issue. I’ll make it quite clear here that I haven’t looked and really have no idea, so I’m certainly not qualified to point fingers. (Between you and me, I think it’s Flash more than anything.)

We shall agree to differ on the keyboard thing!

If I could score a free N900 that was thinner and didn’t have the keyboard that’d be great, mind.

Also since I got an E71 last year, I don’t think I could survive without a hardware keyboard.

Symbian have solved the problem with a comprehensive native security model, which means you can have the things you want like being able to hack apps in Python if you so desire (or .NET, or C, or C++ with or without QT or Glib.) but the downside is you have to go through the signing program if you want to distribute.

Of course, the iPhone has the worst of both worlds. Much worse auditing, and absolutely no choice in development tools by fiat.