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I'm hopelessly hanging on to my N900; ancient OS on obsolete hardware. Neo900 gives me some chance of being able to carry this thing around for a couple of years longer.

But: I will never own a personal (not for development) Android or iPhone. They're bad products dominated by vendors who hate their own customers, and plot against them in order to enable business strategies based on restricting choice.

Right now, with this 'healthy' market of 2 vendors (for how many billion people?), dumbphone here I come...

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i tried that for a good long while; it was a great phone when i got it, and even after it started bothering me that the touchscreen was less than responsive, i enjoyed the OS enough that i stuck to it. however, there were two major bugs that it was clear would never be fixed after nokia EOLed it:

* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped

* the gps started taking anywhere from 30 minutes to never to get a lock

the gps bug finally made me say "okay, i can't deal with this any more" and get an android.

GPS went completely dead for me probably two years ago. Huge bummer. Happened at the same time I started to have motorscooter problems (primary mode of transportation) and until I fix those, it's not critical.

Thinking about getting another from ebay, but I don't know how to make sure I don't get one of the Hong Kong forgeries (burnt by that once before.)

>* sometimes you'd get a phone call, but the phone app would not swap in, and by the time it did the call had dropped

This has always been due to overmultitasking for me. I keep my processlist pretty lean and don't install a lot of daemons - and I haven't missed a call due to that for a few years now.

i rely on my gps a lot even when just walking around the city (i get lost easily), so not having it was really a deal-breaker.

For what its worth, pretty much every world market out there is dominated by vendors that make bad products and rarely care. Usually just a few, even.

Not the healthy ones. Healthy ones have a wide variety of choices, and the competition nipping at your heels keeps user-hating features out of the product. Right now the two smartphone operating systems are being made by two companies who are in court for colluding on hiring. That's the worst possible market, and as you would expect, it produces trash.

One thing I'm looking forward to with my future dumbphones are how disposable they are if they turn out to be horrible.

Would you please name some of these "healthy" markets?

Orthodontia, laser eye surgery, boxed chocolates.

"Shopping around" among dentists is virtually impossible. I can have only the most superficial and largely useless opinion of a dentist until I actually allow them in my mouth, at which point the deal is done. This is not a "healthy market" comparable to anything we're talking about here.

Ditto laser eye surgery and pretty much anything else remotely medical in nature.

Chocolate is not a healthy market either: http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/01/why-so-little-candy-variety...

Orthodontists - not dentists. Boxed chocolate - not candy bars.

Orthodontia and laser eye surgery are examples of the types of healthy markets that flourish in the absence of over-regulation.

You also seem to be conflating the health of markets and some idiosyncratic issues of your own regarding discovering competent suppliers.

> Orthodontists - not dentists.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/orthodontist

or·tho·don·tics

a branch of dentistry that deals with helping teeth to grow straight

If we're not even going to argue about the same thing, I'm done here.

Screwdrivers, silverware, coffeemakers... (can you tell I'm looking around the room?)

Whenever there are no individual participants large enough or enough participants colluding to cause regulatory capture.

The US isn't interested in healthy markets anymore.

"That's the worst possible market"

Second worst.

Don't give up on android yet, it's just a dumb linux and despite vendor plots you can make it into dumb android like this guy did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_-jQc53jw Cyanogen mod is going in the "smart" direction, but a mod could go in the other direction too.

Slides for hellaphone here http://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-20/dc-20-presentations/F...

Edit: Add slides link

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Jolla is shipping, and Sailfish just went 1.0. You may need a friend in Europe to take delivery and ship it to you.

I heard that Jolla isn't compatible with US broadband, and it turned out not to be as open as I need. They've promised that their next phones will move more in that direction, though.

One of my hopes is that Jolla will come through, and my other is that Maemo might be successfully rebased onto mainline Debian rather than crazy, un-upgradable Debian.

Jolla has UX components that are not open, but overall it should be more open than Meego/Maemo. Jolla is supposedly downstream of Mer. There's probably not enough that runs both Sailfish and Mer to work out exactly what you get with each one and how closely related they are, or whether Mer will function better or worse than AOSP as a related open project.

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