I have owned my Blackberry Bold 9780 for nearly 3 years now - which is like 120 in smartphone years. It’s showing its age¹. RIM doesn’t support it, and in fact is actively harming it with the latest BBM updates that are touch-optimized. So I began thinking about a new phone.

Blackberry

Pros:

• Keyboard. I have not gotten used to a touchscreen keyboard. This is a highly subjective but extremely important quality in a phone. No super-secret-awesome keyboard app sauce is going replace a keyboard. I will say that touch keyboards have gone a long way, but it’s still not there for me.

Cons:

• App support is pretty shit. The apps they do have is pretty shit as well. Often a third-tier platform.
• Honestly it feels like the company is staying afloat until it gets a buyer. I’ll give credit to the new CEO however for putting the loltrain back on track.

Apple

Not much complaints. It seems to be a very polished phone. There has been lots of complaints for the walled-garden approach that has taken, at least in the beginning. But it works out well for Apple, and arguably for it’s users. The biggest con by far is the price - approximately $700, or half a new computer. If it was perfect, it’s a bargain price. But nothing is perfect.

Android

I have been cautious of Android mainly because of Google’s involvement in it. Unlike Blackberry, Apple, or Windows, Google probably knows the most about me and the real value I provide is the more data it collects about me.

My friend Tom recently lent me a Samsung phone and I played around with it. I used a new e-mail address, and found it to be fun to use for games or just browsing. I ended up getting an Android tablet for this very reason.

Windows

I really want to give this a try but WIND just stopped selling them. Finding an unlocked WIND compatible phone is turning out to be more work than I want to put in.

Result

How do I Grindr on a flip phone?

¹ how many webpages can you load on 512Mb of RAM? There are some pages I can’t load even with images/javascript disabled

So I updated Linux Mint from 16 to 17. Now Linux Mint is a bit unusual in that it will not automatically upgrade you to the latest version or even tell you that a latest version is out (I was wondering why for 2 months I got almost no new updates). Rather than packaged-based updates, what they recommend instead is that you burn a live CD, try it out, and install the new version over your old version.

Now of course you lose all your settings, and packages you installed, and have to back-up all your data (which of course you were doing anyways, right?).

The only reason I actually bothered with the upgrade is because 16 has a ridiculously old mono version - something from like 2011, and doesn’t work correctly with NuGet, which I need to build a nuget package. So lots of yak shaving.

So I install Linux Mint on a USB and boot it up. Now I had a choices of wiping my entire drive, reinstall over my old OS, or I can repartition the table. I was feeling adventurous and repartitioned so at least next time it won’t wipe out my data.

It was a quick install, I log in and greeted with a welcome message. One of them was “Important Information”. Curious I clicked, which took me to a web page with Known Issues. First on that list:

“In the installer, “Replace OS with Linux Mint” means erase the entire drive”

Which is a problem when you have a dual-boot computer. What kills me even more is that was that this was a bug in 16 version as well ._.

Me: Hello do you sell birch plywood?

CSR: Yes! We sell it 8’ x 4’. 8’ x 2’..

Me: I need 1 metre by a half metre.

CSR: Oh, we never measure in metric. Always in inches and feet.

Me: Oh…

CSR: Let me see if I can convert that for you *breaks out smartphone* let’s see 100 centimetres in a metre.. divided by 2.54 is 39”… and the other side is half of that so it’s… 19 and ¾ inches…

Me: (since they sell by the foot and not in inches) how many feet in 39 inches?

CSR: Let’s see, divide 39 inches by….

(The CSR was very helpful and I don’t mean to make fun of him, but rather I was disappointed that measurements for buying lumber still uses imperial units)