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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I still have a Pebble Steel. I hope the services get open sourced, because if not, it will never work with another phone after the cut-off in July. It's one of the huge disadvantages of how we distribute software today; the bastardization of the Linux software repository into these stupid non-mirrorable/non-free app stores.

It's also sad no phone has slide-out keyboards any more. I'm sure there are several people who would take the thickness trade-off. If a major manufacture produced a physical keyboard phone, there probably would be demand. One of the earliest HTC android devices, after the Evo 4G, was a version with a slide out keyboard. Now the only option seems to be BlueBerries.

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> One of the earliest HTC android devices, after the Evo 4G, was a version with a slide out keyboard.

The first Android phone (let alone the first HTC Android) was the HTC Dream, with a physical keyboard. Back in those days Android didn't even have a software keyboard -- you had to use the physical keyboard.

By the time the Evo 4g came out, hardware keyboards were already considered second class citizens. The Evo Shift 4g had a worse screen, worse camera, and a worse CPU than the Evo 4g despite being released a year later.

Thankfully a few companies have picked up the UMPC market, with products like the GPD Win and the Gemini PDA. I don't need a hardware keyboard on my phone, but I do need a portable device with one for emergency SSH sessions while on the road.

I continue to retain the belief that hardware vendors intentionally killed keyboard sliders by making them worse phones than their non-keyboard counterparts, then claiming they didn't need to build them because nobody wanted them. They sat a full year behind in hardware specs in most cases.

I don't believe it is the only reason, but it certainly significantly hurt them. They're also less attractive/bulkier, have less room for battery, are more expensive to design/manufacture, have higher failure rates, etc. I would still pay ridiculous amounts for a phone with flagship specs and flagship build quality, with a physical keyboard.

No argument regarding the app stores, but for Android you can (usually?) make a backup of the APK and then move it to another device.

Alternatively: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadg...

Funny story: I did this a lot when I had Android, but offloaded the APKs to my computer for storage purposes. This became a lot buggier and irritating when Android switched USB handling from mass storage (like a flash drive) to MTP (like a digital camera). I once tried to talk to Dianne Hackborn about this difficulty at Google I/O, and the moment I mentioned 'APK file', she said Google 'didn't support piracy' and walked off.

That day I learned backing up your own apps was 'piracy'.

Tangential, but:

> when Android switched USB handling from mass storage (like a flash drive) to MTP (like a digital camera).

This is how, step by step, computers become even more difficult to use by regular people, and how computing becomes balkanized. All the attempts at fucking with the hierarchical filesystem are ass-backwards and create inconsistent abstractions, which make learning hard.

I don't get your concern; MTP is an hierarchical filesystem, with directories and files. It's just that it works as a kind of network filesystem rather than allow the computer direct access to the storage device.

It may be hierarchical, but it abstracts away what's actually stored, and as a result of this translation it feels different. Hard to put my finger on every aspect here, but in the various combinations of desktop and mobile OS-es that I've experienced, MTP feels slower, more klunky, more prone to fail during data transfer, and most importantly - over it, devices expose only a small part of the stored data, which leads regular people to wonder a) where their transfered files end up on the mobile device, and b) how do they transfer e.g. downloaded documents.

I just ran into this trying to copy files off a current Android phone. Windows10 simply wouldn't select all files in the camera directory so I couldn't alt+enter to see the total size.

Tried to copy all user-accessible directories, spent a while calculating size then failed with 'unspecified error'.

I hope I can find a way to enable standard file access. I did manage to make a backup with ADB and then decrypt it with a java tool... and it only included two of the directories. Maybe my internal flash storage is corrupted?

MTP is super unreliable. When copying a lot of files off a phone, I usually have to disconnect and retry at least once or twice.

MTP/mass storage may be switchable. At least on my older CyanogenMod device, Settings>Storage>menu in upper-right>USB computer connection, gives a "Connect as..." selection of MTP, PTP, Charge only, UMS (mass storage).

Mileage may vary based on device and age. This was going on seven years ago now and not on a device that could run CyanogenMod. Google has significantly reworked their storage handling since this incident. I am still miffed about the accusation of piracy though.

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