Monday, December 1st, 2014

	Into the stone age
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My BlackBerry Z10 is broken. It keeps restarting randomly at least
twice a day, which is pretty annoying. Since it's just nine months
old and warranty is still valid, I took it back to T-Mobile and we
shall see, what they can do about it.

As I have box full of old smartphones, I didn't bother getting
another BlackBerry for the time, that will my Z10 spend with its
maker. I just took one of these phones, charged battery and started
to use it. Even though it's the newest one from the box (HTC Snap,
2009), every time I use it, I feel like looking out from window, 
seeing cro-magnon riding his dinosaur to work. 

Don't get me wrong: I like the QWERTY keyboard and I think, it's 
great shame, that modern all-touch phones outnumber those with
keyboard about billion to one. I even don't mind non-touch display,
because I always preferred D-pad, cursor keys, trackball or optical
trackpad when using smartphone on the go. And I certainly don't
have any objections against device able to operate three days on 
a 1500mAh battery, while checking e-mail accounts every 10 minutes.

The problem isn't the phone itself, the problem is, how the around
changed since 2009. Do you want to visit any social network? 
No client for Windows Mobile is working anymore, because protocols
have been changed. Do you want to find some geocaches? Sorry, but 
all online apps parsed HTML code of the geocaching website and that
code is changing almost every week, etc.

Windows Mobile were still in use, when smartphones became dependent
on online communication. Since that time there is not much to do
without server on the other side of wireless connection and in this
case there are not many servers left. This makes any old Windows 
Mobile smartphone just a tiny bit more useful than cheap phone 
without operating system. On the other hand, this is good news for
PalmOS users - this system never made made it to the era of online
dependency, so most existing apps can still be used now.

.