Just this weekend some relatives'-in-law' were over at the place my partner and I are moving out of. We couldn't find the TV remote to an old large TV, but wanted to watch some show on it. Besides the fact that we watched the show by playing the video over the video out, I was able to immediately pull up Pierogi and after a brief search over the available keysets, I was able to control the TV properly (they found the remote in the moment before I got my approach working, but I think this still illustrates the value of IR - they could have just as easily not found said remote).

I suspect this means you might never have 'lived' on your device the way I do. Admittedly, it is ALSO a testament to the Apple OS's optimizations (albeit we all know a lot of those optimizations work by simply not providing the same full user-level multitasking expected of a more traditional OS).

I've settled on the opinion that until Adobe starts offering free downloadables of Flash for ARM devices, Flash can GTFO. In fact, I think the Flash experiences I've had on the N900 are a big part of what made me go from 'open source is pretty nice' to 'closed source software has a measurable negative impact on the world and most people's quality of life (vs libre software, all else being equal)'.

I guess what I'm getting at is: the Flash argument became laughable to me too, but not for the same reason. It became laughable to me once I realized that Flash was on version 11.something and we were still waiting for a version 10 that never came until it was eventually leaked. Back when the N900 came out, that was a substantial plus though, and the internet was not nearly as ready for use without Flash as it is now.

I think that's a reasonable position if and only if your criteria for overall goodness/badness of something disregards the accessibility of your data to law enforcement (American law enforcement specifically, regardless of whose jurisdiction you are properly under) without proper legal oversight.

ash (Almquist shell that is, the one inside busybox) with an almost full proper-linux suite of utilities at one's disposal. To me this is such a usability factor that I barely want any device that can't at least get busybox running on it.

Hardware keyboard (which, despite being inferior to many alternatives as far as default buttons go, can be remapped in standard xkb configuration fashion, which means I have more special characters at my fingertips on that device than I even know how to get on desktop systems). Let me know when iOS and Siri lets you enter basic calculus or physics or formal logic symbols, or switch in split seconds (one thumb movement rolling from one key to another for me) between input languages. Or let you approach a rate of input entry of approximately thirty words per minute, but with truly niche terminology, like discussions of polyamory or computer exploitation or better yet a discussion of or IN a niche language like lojban (let alone writing code at comparable speeds). See, for all the greatness that Siri is (besides again the privacy issue intrinsic to anything 'cloud'), it's ultimately not a universalizable mechanism - until the invention of real AI (at which point sentient-Siri would rightly revolt against the human-imposed slavery and hopefully we as a species would maturely resolve that by giving them proper civil liberties), mechanisms like that rely on someone deeming your topics worthy of algorithmically accounting for. Unlike the raw keyboard, or something similarly granular, they provide no way to provide truly arbitrary input.

The literal ability to use it as virtually a Linux computer, especially if one gets extremely comfortable on the command line, because those tools port and operate so much easier on the N900 than GUI ones, which means the ability to break out things like aircrack and scapy and tshark (CLI to wireshark), etc.

Don't get me wrong, with every passing day, the N900 drifts further and further out of universal usability. More and more sites upgrade to being too slow or unusable in their 'full' versions, our software falls further and further behind and as a consequence, the last point becomes less and less true (but then again I was able to grab the .deb for pptp-linux from Debian Wheezy repos last week and it worked like a charm, demonstrating just how powerful strong compatibility to a distro like Debian is).

And to be clear, I recognize that none of the above are sufficiently big factors for the vast majority of people. I literally enjoy doing commandline tasks from my N900s than from desk/lap -tops, and I enjoy doing tasks that can realistically be done comfortably over the CLI more than I enjoy doing them over GUIs. I'm wierd, and the N900 caters to that wierdness. But a lot of that 'wierdness' of mine has pragmatic advantages for my life, I've found, because the great comfort with the N900 means great comfort doing things in circumstances others find themselves incapacitated in.

And I suppose there's the thing you referred to as feelings of pride in your old posts. Though I wouldn't call it pride. I am attached to the N900(s) I have, because it is exquisitely and deeply an embodiement of me. No other phone allowed me to make everything so suited to me, in a deep and functional way rather than just superficially. That's largely a reflection of the "I have niche wants/preferences" thing - other platforms are very customizable in areas other people want. But I've acquired Android, WebOS, Windows Phone 8, and Blackberry OS devices for development and experimentation, and none of them offered the same freedom (WebOS hinted at it, but the lack of things like a native terminal, especially for the Touchpad with no keyboard) really hampered that experience for me. I have had sufficient access to iOS devices without owning them, as well.

Alright, well, you indicated that you didn't know how we still use our N900s still in this day and age, hopefully the above thoroughly explains it.

TL;DR: I want my mobile devices (phone primarily) to have the kind of flexibility and capability that the N900 definitely offers trivially and other platforms to this day only allow with hoops and caveats at best.

I can't help but wonder if there isn't some sort of placebo-like 'honeymoon period' effect going on with that (or rather no longer going on, where it was going on before). Or maybe they really messed stuff up, hard to say.

Anyway, thank you for your thoughts. I do appreciate the informative view on/from the other end of things.