I don't want to eat my phone, thanks :D

(sorry, better joke quality needs caffeine)

just much with the metrics some slim down here larger screen there.. nicer switches for the buttons

you know

but this general DESIGN would be great for someone like me

and i can fuckin make a phone call without looking using the keypad

but even if they JUST brought back an android slider

BlackBerry was a huge seller in Venezuela, people simply loved the keyboards (and BBM was a plus that kept people locked into the platform)

keyboard that would help so much

tomman: i prefered the palm treo form factor over blackberries standard

it was so huge that Android had a HARD time breaking into our market until 2013 or so

fit better in the hand or hands

frankly i'd be happer with a pots telephone network for voice comms.. worked fine for how many decades?

and fiber for data

at some point, 70% of the BlackBerries sold in Latin America were in my very own country

so you bought the last 70% of blackberries?

before they became irrelevant

people was THAT addicted to them (I never liked them, and even when BB did a flip BB -the Pearl Flip- it was still running clumsy software)

finally the BB killer was.... WhatsApp

i don't even know what that app is

a stupid chat app now owned by Meta

i know OF it as in the name and people use it

also, mandatory to exist in societies like mine :/

it's as horrible as you can imagine

it has a near 100% market share in Latam

tomman: just wait the US will be a collapsed failing country of misery and poverty soon enough don't worry

Anyway, point is that WhatsApp allowed people to realize two things

we are already half way there

1) there was life outside BB

and 2) BBM wasn't cool anymore

and WhatsApp having BB versions helped the exodus

now there are no surviving BBs in service in the 2020s

not even for parts, it seems :D

but gosh, that migration took WAY TOO LONG

Between 2007 and 2015 or so, Android was "plataforma non grata" in Venezuela, and so was iPhone/iOS

telcos pushed BB as hard as they could

Another thing helped breaking the habit: our country imploding as a nation led to many things, including the death of the carrier-subsidized phone

so dealers were forced to source their own handsets

there were shortages of everything in the early to mid '10s

including cellphones of course

And the iPhone was simply too expensive (and originally too difficult to source, this was back when AT&T still mostly held the exclusive distribution rights)

Telefonica Movistar did briefly tried with Firefox OS around 2014 or so

very few handsets sold, mostly in the black market by corrupt dealers that would get the cheap phones from Movistar and sell them at huge price markups outside the formal sales channels

Or people buying cheap phones and quickly reselling them online

nearly every Firefox OS phone for sale in MercadoLibre was a Movistar unit with next to no use, at hefty markups just because

(I *almost* bought one, it was during those days my trusty V9x started dying, and nobody stocked RAZRs anymore...)

btw my kaios flip phone.. went to open it and it was fine then shorted out .. after that i said fuck mozilla and anyone who looks like Mozilla .. and then I said except for me and my allies and then busted the screen off and threw it out the window.. as happens with defiant technology

also my command chair that one time

and in the chair's case not so much out the window as THROUGH a window.. yeah I was channeling Steve Balmer cause I was out of smokes for three days

my KrapOS® turd still survives somehow :D

i decided to not throw anything i couldn't pick up with one hand and not throw stuff at glass windows.. THEN i worked on not throwing shit

it's not a flip phone, sadly - but a candybar, a Blu Zoey Smart

somehow its firmware hasn't crashed yet, although battery life is horrible

And of course it's 3G only

Surprisingly there are still KaiOS 2.x phones for sale here, enw even

...all of them are 3G only

based on some craptacular Mediatek or Spreadtrum chipsets, and often with 256MB RAM instead of 512

nobody wants to sell flip or slider phones anymore here, except for $1500+ foldable Samsungs

my LG VX6100 flip feature phone.. was all tricked out.. I transplanted the guts into a crystal clear case and got a gold and silver little stub replacement that extended slightly.. didn't do shit for reception but it didn't hurt it either and used bitpim to load up custom ringtones i cut as well as notification tones.. the firmware tho had no memory protection so if i pushed too much data it would start overwriting ram

(that naturally nobody buys, especially when you can just pick a $1000 Galaxy S2x which is the most coveted flagship here for those that can burn $1K on a cellphone in my country)

ha, Bitpim

good times

FUCK YEAH!

not much you could do with Bitpim on Motorola firmwares, tho

and odd ass sketchy data cables

lg was wide open

for Motorolas the money was on seem edits, and if you were brave enough (and you had a K1m/L7c or a V3m and was willing to lose the memcard slot), you could say "O CANADA~!" and flash them to Telus firmware

used it for the 6100 8100 8300 and some of the "touch" feature phones i had before getting an android.. my feature phone was better LOL

and get sweet sweet Java apps

instead of the BREW jail

(for some reason we got that curse here in Venezuela)

FUCKING BREW

yep

I REMEMBER BREW

sadly me too

no sideloading

BREW AIM MSN AND YAHOO

as one client

wanna dev apps for your own phone? Sure, pay $400 to Verisigh for 400 test signatures

that will only work on your phone

yeah ask trolltech how that worked out

and everything was Qualcomm Proprietary And Confidential™

but then again ask apple how THAT worked out for KDE

ugh, I've been always convinced that while Qualcomm makes great hardware, their software is awful and they have way too many lawyers making software

I mean, the MSM6500 chipset was great, but too gimped because of BREW

I remember my Venezuelan-Canadian Movistar K1m flashed to Telus firmware

Palm OS SmartPhones was the ticket.. fuck access co

I lost Spanish, but gained oh so much freedom

despite the JVM being kinda trashy (Esmertec JBed, a JVM port to BREW)

I loved that little phone... until the flex cable failed around 2012 and got forced to jump ship from CDMA2000 to UMTS (back then UMTS worked badly here)

i was pretty much the only Venezuelan at HowardForums hacking Motorolas :D

...in fact those were the ONLY hackable phones from our entire CDMA lineup

(at least those running legit Moto P2K/BREW firmware, not the Compal ODMs)

good times~~~~

running a palmos emulator on android makes it great.. but since its an emulator nothing you do in palmos matters and it can't manage your phone calls

Now, while BREW was a scourge here, there WAS a way out without flashing phones to sketchy Canadian firmware: buy a Nokia!

CDMA Nokias had Java (a few had BREW too, but nobody cared)

the only feature you would be missing was EvDO (because Nokia used their own custom CDMA chipsets and could not license EvDO from the greedy Q)

sadly after the Nokia-Qualcomm lawsuit, the former was forced to ditch those chipsets, native S40, and instead started ODMing CDMA phones with a S40 "lookalike" built over BREW (or just reskinned Verizon firmware, uuugh!)

anyway my THEORY is in exchange for everyone going LTE and being at least theoretically compatible.. esim is to replace sims else they would have stayed on CMDA based shit

this is my theory

the final legit CDMA Nokia was the 6276, a S40 phone - it was the same thing as the 6275/6275i, sans BREW

i was loyal to LG Phones for a long time

(Still have one somewhere, although the battery is dead as a brick)

until android and even today lg can't make a good phone

that doesn't run theirs or verizons custom firmware

Well, LG exited the cellphone market about 2-3 yeara ago

did they drop out?

too much competition from Samsung and the 9000 Chinesium brands

yep

they called it quits during the early days of the pandemic, if I recall

no it was they couldn't manage to make ANY good phone.. I even revewed one.. it was slow as shit

The few CDMA and UMTS pre-Android LGs I could play with here were indeed awful

ah

the UI was pretty, but SLOW

same with Samsungs

my LG 8300 had a menu system that used flash

if you wanted a fast, reactive phone... you would get a Motorola

Ah yeah, many of those Verizon LGs used some embedded version of Flash, same as many Japanese phones of the same era

Flash Lite, IIRC

yes but i had bitpim

and flash 5

or 8

whichever version

There were several, Flash Lite was a rebadge anyway

yes but I did some.. replacements

My final CDMA Motorola was a RAZR VE20, and I had a love-hate relationship with that phone

I also regularly hacked the firmware to replace Version Wireless with -Binary Outcast-

it was a RAZR, thicker than usual but had a jack! And separate USB!

on all my LG phones

tomman: ever change the carrier name?

But the firmware... was reskinned Verizon junk (curious, as Verizon never stocked the VE20)

ha, on Motorolas that was a couple of seem edits

trickier was to change the CLI wallpaper

a mistake and you would have to reflash the phone

well from 2004 till 2011 all my calls came through on my cell phone as being on the Binary Outcast Cell Network

sooooo

I changed carrier names, boot/shutdown splashes, CLI wallpaper

the one thing I couldn't reskin was the BREW appmanager, and that was mostly due to lack of info

the VE20 however was a nightmare

it was Verizon junk in disguise, not traditional Moto UI/P2K firmware

most of the classic seem edits would not work anymore, the entirety of the UI was no longer a native app but a big fat BREW app

furthermore, they used a newer version of BREW for which the leaked Qualcomm editors would not work with

the verizon unified UI they used towards the end of the feature phone era with THAT FUCKING GOD DAMNED VERIZON MISSED CALL SOUND YOU CAN'T DISABLE AND WHEN YOU COULD NO ONE EVER DID AND DRIVES ME UP THE ... Hello, caller?

I think we been disconnected

you couldn't even debrand or even edit the main menu!

Motorola called this particular dog vomit "Brewery"

it came with 2 skins, and both were terrible

I was GENERALLY satsified with that stupid v cutout from the top status bar cause I could change it to blue and it otherwise said Binary Outcast.. but it was ON THE EDGE of acceptability

lol

it was LAGGY, it leaked RAM (just run the MP3 player for a couple hours.. .you would have to reboot the phone afterwards)

and the stupid screen transitions (some Swedish effects pack from a developer long absorbed by Qualcomm) added to the lag, although those COULD be customized somewhat since they were XML!

Cascades, by The Astonishing Tribe was the name of that piece of code licensed by Motorola just for stupid screen transitions :D

i just don't understand how an android phone gets slower and slower and slower over time

except by design

Google Play Services excels at that :D

Back to the VE20, despite the abysmal firmware that nearly caused me to return the phone, the build quality was legendary Motorola tier

that phone lasted TEN YEARS... well, almost

bought in December 2009, it started failing around late '18 (dead pixels on display, then the earpiece died, and finally the hinge cracked eventually tearing out the flex cable)

the phone died in early 2019 for good

...and the CDMA network back then was in life support, as this was a state telco :D

(it was finally shut down in 2020, after years of delays, and a 4G LTE network that was still in paper mostly)

anyone wanna loan me 20 united states funny money they will get it back on the first-third next month or I can relay it to the SeaMonkey Project first of the month..

funny money vouchers*

All the frg.

nsITobin hi

nsITobin see private chat

what bleeps, "turn on javascript", google.com/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=jKiGZ_uYHdaYptQPnqbcmAE

heh. without knowing ddg's url, i can't get it, cause google won't give it to me ;-)

hi therube, tomman and nsITobin

yo IanN_Away~

a nice, mostly relaxing day, hot, and no Clownflare meddling so far

...did I mention it's HOT outside? Veeeeery unusual for January here

that's nice :)

IanN_Away: Reporting.

nsITobin: you well?

compared to previous eras.. yeah

actually I think I am fairly well

How about you IanN_Away

aside from the obvious

nsITobin: getting there slowly

I have decided.. I will prevail.. and even if I don't.. It will be a magnificent spectical no matter what.

on the less grandious side.. Finding new and innovative (ffs) ways to help.

IanN_Away: I am exploring again.. trying to locate the core of the internet that seems fragmentized into a million little holes and corners

nsITobin: you can get it in a box, see the TV show The IT Crowd

I should check that show out..

but what I mean is... yeah we have our irc islands and open source projects and whatever the hell I am supposed to be.. but where is the REST of it..

the internet and web that was here when I started showing up here..

i can't believe we are all that is left

They all are watching cat videos on a mobile now

lol

It would be funny if it wouldn't at least a bit true.

cat vs cucumber videos

with sponsoring ads by you 20 year old influencer with a peanut brain

well if people had listened to me when I was in my 20s....

I am telling you this all could have been solved with a splash screen... or something

well but can you save the princess? mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2010…-is-much-truth-in-old-far-side.html

I have never beaten .. a video game before Portal.

technically sonic 2 as well but i consider it beat when you have all the chaos emeralds

and ain't done it

xenon ovrdrive but I cheated :) The bitmap brothers still rule.

frg_Away: Mozilla extensions are just gateway drugs to mozilla app dev

we're all a bunch of addicts because they cut us off

the list of videogames I've beaten (not counting visual novels and simple puzzle/card games) is slim

so we started making our own

I think the newest game I've beaten was... Portal

tell me this is not AN interpetation lol

never got the time to finish Portal 2

got stuck somewhere and ragequitted

I love the portal series

patch day brb

And for the Windows 7 x64 crowd we have kb5050681 and kb5050049 today

which is larger bmo bugs or kb articals

kbs because of the bloat :)

Downloads for visual studio seem to be literally down so can't update VS2019 today.

?

ah download.visualstudio.microsoft.com is back

well if its frg or visual studio.. I like frg better..

I miss the_bot

do you miss the_bot njsg?

guess all the coffee pots ran dry

:P