One of the main reasons I ditched the CAT B35, and KaiOS more generally, was the fairly woeful implementation of predictive text. On a phone with a keypad the main mode of text entry – for SMS, but also in the browser and more widely in the phone operating system – will be some form of T9 text input.
It’s fairly mind-boggling to me that with 20 years of advancement and thousands of times more computing power, modern phones struggle to get as efficient key-based input as 90’s Nokias.
Six ways in which Google make it as difficult as possible to avoid using their products in on your Android mobile device:
As I described in the backstory, hardware-wise the Xiaomi Qin F21 Pro was the perfect form factor for me. The power of a smartphone, but actually designed to be a focused communication device, rather than a hamstrung computer.
There are thoughtful debates about the security pros and cons, but the prerequisite for this level of control is rooting the phone.
However, on the software side it needed a bit of work. The phone arrived with little bloat and mercifully no Google components – but there was still a fair bit of Xioami stock software, including the notorious browser which reportedly was spying on Chinese users for every page browse [I have no idea if this is the case in the internal Qin].
For a long time now I’ve been fairly comfortable simply stating
I plain don’t like smartphones
I’ve gone into this in more detail elsewhere – but the short version is:
However, I need a telephone of some sort. And while I try my utmost to eliminate it, there is some software which (grudgingly) I’m compelled to run outside of a PC.
A series of blog posts going into great detail on how I left behind large-touchscreen smartphones and Google – and set up a lightweight, reliable but powerful Android phone that works for me rather than vice versa.
Some useful resources that inspired this work:
Take a 2015-era, 11-inch MacBook Air. Strip off the proprietary software tailored exactly for this hardware and model. Install the most do-it-yourself Linux distribution there is.
First up, why (on earth) would I want to do this?