• Smartphone user

    I can no longer ignore smartphones, for various reasons. So I bought one, an Android based Samsung phone. One of the reasons I’ve avoided smartphones so far is they run on non-free software. While the underlying operating system is mostly free, phone vendors are active in putting special restrictions on it. Samsung installs its own […]

  • I Forgot My Phone

    This short YouTube movie illustrates in a nice way what I wrote about in my recent post about smartphones.

  • Freedom on Android devices

    If you care about freedom and you use Android based devices, please consider donating to FSF’s fundraising program for Replicant. Replicant is free (“free” as in “freedom”) replacement for Android; software freedom is very important on mobile devices. See the fundraising announcement for more information.

  • Slaves of smartphones

    I’ve been recently present in company of my colleagues for a week. My colleagues are all equipped with smartphones. Whenever and wherever we were doing something, it always ended up by half the people staring into their phones. Typically playing with them in some way as children like to do. Well, we’re an IT company […]

  • E-ink reader

    In spite my recent rant about such devices I decided to buy an e-ink reader. The primary reason was that it’s uncomfortable for me to read long texts on a monitor. My requirements were: Large screen, stylus and a usable SDK. Considering the requirements there was only one acceptable e-ink reader I could find on […]

  • Smart phones one year later

    When I was looking for a new mobile phone and looked at smart phones more than a year ago, I’ve found there has been no working smart phone equipped with a truly free operating system providing rich set of applications and nice development environment. It seems there happened at least two important changes in this […]

  • Lessons from Sharp Zaurus

    There are areas where free software community fails. Not for technical reasons or lack of resources, but because of management and strategic planning incompetence. Once I got an idea to get a Linux handheld. There were two models available at the time: Sharp Zaurus and Nokia tablet. The Nokia tablet didn’t have any keyboard so […]

  • Smart phones

    My old mobile phone becomes a bit unreliable, so I look for a new one. Perhaps a smart phone would be useful, but I’m not interested in proprietary and virus prone OSes without available source code and lacking good development tools and community support. Given these constraints there are at most two options: Google Android […]

  • Installing pdaXrom

    Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 is shipped with its own Linux operating system based on Qtopia. The system is not bad, it is stable and although it requires some updates to become really usable, it provides nice PDA environment covering many areas of use. But it suffers of some problems: it’s incompatible (as it uses Qtopia instead […]