zlacker

>>iBelie+(OP)
My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms.

I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"*

* Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM.

>>Admira+K7
I have the GPD Win that I bought a couple years ago, which is more or a less a Nintendo-DS-Sized computer running "real" Windows, and I love it. I can do programming on the train, even while standing up, as well as use all the tooling that I like, including Vim actually. The only limitation for me has honestly been Windows, since I'm more of a Unixey guy.

Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are basically supercomputers nowadays, at least compared to what we had in the 90's, but I feel incredibly limited in what I can actually do with my iPhone. I can't easily code stuff for the iPhone in Haskell, I can't open up multiple "tabs" of videos on the YouTube app, and even a lot of the apps that do get ported over end up having incredibly limited "mobile optimized" versions.

I would absolutely love a phone that could let me run the "real" versions of apps when I need to. Ubuntu Touch was trying this, and I honestly don't think I'm unique in this desire.

>>tomber+Ya
The Nokia N900 used to fill this spot between phone and PC for me. It has a slider keyboard and came with a Debian based Linux distro (Maemo) installed on it. Typing was much more comfortable than with a touchscreen and with a few changes to the Xorg keyboard config it was even suitable for programming. The padding madness wasn't there yet and even though the screen was very small by today's standards, it was used very effectively.

There was a small community of users who were building applications (mostly built with GTK+) that were often of higher quality than what I got used to on Android now. They could be installed via the App store equivalent or just using apt-get from the terminal.

There were some great "Whoa, this works?" moments, like running the full-blown Arduino IDE and flashing something via USB-OTG or writing a Python script that makes the phone act as a sonar. And everything almost with the ease of a Desktop-PC, just a bit slower :)

I went through four used N900s (they unfortunately aren't very durable) before I gave up and got myself an Android because the web became too bloated and slow. I still miss it every time I'm using my phone for anything different than calling someone or taking a photo. I just had to get that off my chest.

>>encypr+221
As someone that had the privilege to see the start of it, it was a pity how everything went.

It if weren't for the whole Linux vs Symbian, plus rebooting devenvs multiple times across Symbian and Maemo history, things would have turned out much different.

But like all major corporations, politics play a big role.