Focused Purposeful Devices and My Personal Computing Outlook

2012-11-02

If you read my gemlog you've no doubt noticed the PDA slant lately. Another device that I use a lot and love dearly is my Odroid Go. The Odroid Go is a small gaming handheld with an ESP32 microcontroller and a modest set of physical buttons. The Palm m500 PDA can do quite a lot but is really best suited to certain types of tasks. What I like about these devices and their more purposeful design is that the details can be more tailored to what the device is used for. The Odroid Go's good physical buttons make for a much better gaming experience than a touchscreen. The buttons are good for some of the other things the Odroid Go can do as well like playing music. It is much more satisfying but more importantly just a better and more precise experience to pause or skip tracks with a corresponding physical button. No unlocking first, no swiping around, no accidentally tapping the wrong thing. Heck you can operate it without even looking. I may be lonely in this assertion but I prefer just about any input method for text over an on-screen keyboard. Graffiti input can be pretty quick with some practice but a folding keyboard is MUCH better. I would rather enter text with either of them over an error-prone on-screen keyboard with terrible "auto-correct" which usually does more "correcting" of things I had right in the first place while still leaving obvious and common typos uncorrected for some reason.

In the case of the Palm m500 the display is a great match to the use case. Why have a fancy power-hogging color display tanking battery life of a device that is not a good size or resolution for multimedia? The monochrome display of the m500 is a good fit for the mostly text based things that the PDA excels at. Palm OS PDAs also have physical buttons. Generally 6 buttons below the display and the newer ones had 4 buttons and a 5 way directional button. These buttons are great for games, scrolling text and launching specific applications quickly.

It is somehow more satisfying to me to use devices like these. They are generally more reliable, more predictable and I enjoy interacting with them more. The physical buttons, the stylus, the battery life that I cannot deplete even in a full day's worth of heavy usage. Those things just make using them feel more natural and unobtrusive. I don't have to worry about managing usage to avoid running out of battery. There aren't useless things running in the background, notifications popping up or constant necessary updates for security reasons since these two devices in particular are used offline.

I am often lured to the head space of wanting anything with a processor in it to do all the things. But I think that is often a fast track to doing a lot of things poorly. Even though I still keep a smartphone with me most of the time using these more focused devices has greatly reduced how much I'm using it. This makes the smartphone's battery last a lot longer which is nice too.

I'm in the process of, according to what I jotted in my PDA todo list, trying to "de-everything" my android phone. My goal is to use it as little as possible, only taking it out for the things it is truly needed for. Actual phone calls and SMS messages (but hopefully not even for the SMS most of the time thanks to KDEConnect), to take photos (for now) and the occasional one-off task that is just less painful on android for whatever reason.

Picking up the slack for what I used to use my android smartphone for will be multiple other devices that are more focused and/or significantly more open, viable long-term and with better input methods. More on the open and long-term viability points later. For me this means using my NUC desktop and Thinkpad when I'm doing something that requires the resources of a somewhat modern computer. This is not all that often honestly, so I hope to keep them shutdown the majority of the time. Additionally, I have a Pinephone that has mostly been a test-bed for trying out the various mobile linux efforts and tracking how they are coming along. I will be making a concerted effort to use the Pinephone for the majority of the general usage that my andoroid phone used to get. For now I have disabled the Pinephone's front camera, modem and microphone and will start using it like a pocket size tablet rather than a phone. My usage of the Pinephone is very likely to go way up in the near future and possibly even replace a significant portion of my Thinkpad's typical usage when the official keyboard accessory arrives which should be later this month. This will not only solve the input issue of a touchscreen only smartphone but also another thing holding the Pinephone back, battery life. The keyboard will have an additional fairly large battery in it that should greatly extend the runtime.

Now, this might sound kind of ridiculous, using so many different devices instead of a modern smartphone that can theoretically do everything I use computers for. Except for the fact that modern smartphones are such a closed, proprietary, human-hostile and environmental disaster. I don't think I need to go into all the things wrong with smartphones. Lets just say I have dump truck size issues with them from top to bottom. User freedom, privacy, security, UI/UX and probably most importantly the environmental component. This is kind of a culmination of all the other issues amounting to planned obsolescence that forces or coerces the masses to dump their "old" phone at far to regular an interval for the new thing.

Rather than continue on this slow-motiton trainwreck, I'm leping off the train. I don't want to be constantly disgusted with how my smartphone is not enjoyable to use. How I can't ever quite make it do exactly what I want it to and then upgrading to a newer one every few years because my old one is not getting security or OS updates anymore and I can't install an alternative OS on it. Only to find out that the new one doesn't really improve anything other than starting the updates clock over again for a while. These more focused and offline devices that I use and plan to use do the things they do well. Due to their offline nature I can continue using them for years and years into the future and they will continue serving their purpose until the hardware fails. They are in most cases cheap and easy to repair too. The more general purpose devices that are extremely open stand a much better chance of still being useable 5+, 10+ years down the road. This alarming rate of tossing out hardware due to capitalistic greed is disgusting to me and I'd like to do what I can to avoid any more of it.

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