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Phones can only last so long and my admittedly ancient BlackBerry Curve took one-too-many tumbles and now needs to be replaced. Thanks to recent changes in the cell-phone market, I'm looking to purchase a phone, outright, and get a month-to-month plan for it.
I am very privacy conscious and have, so far, avoided Apple (walled garden - blegh) or Android (tell Google everything). I suspect there are fellow Soylentils who hold a similar perspective. (My current cell provider is US Cellular. I'm open to change, but would like to avoid AT&T and Verizon --- have heard too many horror stories.)
Background: I've been programming computers since the 1970s. I've tried using Apple products, but it seems they are user-friendly to the extent that you want to do what they have already decided is okay. They seem to expose a bare minimum of controls to allow customization. That would frustrate me to no end.
So, that leaves me with Android as the other major alternative. I am leery about giving any more info to Google than necessary -- given a choice, I regularly choose an alternative over a Google product (i.e. DuckDuckGo for search, openstreetmap, etc.)
My thoughts, at the moment, are to get a phone and load cyanogenmod on it. I've read good things about the privacy capabilities it provides; especially fine-grained allow/deny access permissions. Added bonus is ability to apply updates more frequently than a telco-branded phone would provide. I have no experience with rooting/flashing a phone, so I need this process to be as idiot-proof as possible. Also, I'm leery of getting a phone only to see support for it dropped shortly thereafter.
[Continues...]
Must-have: SOLID cellular reception (my apartment seems to have plaster walls - the BB still got great reception), removable battery, removable storage (micro-SD card), WiFi, LTE (USA), good camera, and fine-grained permissions control.
Nice-to-have: hardware keyboard, tethering (i.e. use my phone to get an internet connection that I'd share with my laptop), FM Radio.
REALLY nice to have: Ability to bring up a terminal window and have full CLI ability (e.g. bash) where I could edit/run custom scripts/programs.
Size/specs: I do not want or need a phablet or the latest/greatest processors. I'm reminded of the adage to buy last-year's top-of-the-line model. For some degree of future-proofing, would like to be able to view 1080p content on it.
Other: What did I forget? What things do you wish you knew that you only found out after you got your phone?
My main system runs Win 7 Pro but I could also run a live CD with some Linux distro.
What have your experiences been? Both positive and negative? Please save me from making a mistake that you have already learned from!
I'm looking to replace my phone within the next day or so. I've been impressed with the shared knowledge of this community -- please help!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday April 20 2016, @01:34PM
Privacy-wise, the phone OS doesn't make a bit difference in my opinion. I even still use a Windows Phone. The problem is, each phone has closed source parts in the firmware, so unless you trust the vendor at least that far, you can only get a dump-phone and take out the battery as often as you don't really need it.
Once you trust the vendor to only abuse you as much as they officially grant themselves the right in their EULA and admit openly, I don't see much difference in trustworthyness of Google, Apple or Microsoft. You could go for Ubuntu phone or Cyanogen-Mod, but might afaik lose the use of push-notifications (still required for good WhatsApp-/Telegram-messaging-exerience and for some other services) and navigation software (Google Maps is afaik not open source, and while you can post-install it to Cyanogenmod, that would probably not be legal. I might be wrong, if someone knows better please tell me so.) HERE Maps is available for free, so if you manage to get it from Google Play, you should be able to have navigation on Cyanogenmod.
What you can do, however, is to set up your own Owncloud to manage your contacts and appointments. Officially at least, they should not be forwarded to your mobile OS vendor in that case. With dynamic DNS you should be able to run it from home probably even on a raspberry pi. Without dyndns you could still run it at home and synchronize only when you are in reach of your wifi. Owncloud works very nicely with Windows Phone (built in support for iCloud accounts), but you have to create a self-signed certificate and install on your phone; Windows Phone will not allow an unencrypted connection, but will accept self-signed certificates :-). For Android, you can get it working with "Easy DAV" nicely as well.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Wednesday April 20 2016, @06:46PM
For maps, you can use OsmAnd or (OsmAnd+). It is open source with the difference being the paid version has some nice integration features for adding to the OSM database, they have polished the UI a bit and getting data directly onto your phone is a bit easier.
Email / calendering can be tough. Unless you want to run your own server, you are going to have to do desktop sync. I have a Pre3 in storage with a working copy of Chapura. I loved it - I could even sync Sharepoint Calenders that were provisioned in Outlook but, alas, WebOS is no more :(
For Android, there are a few desktop sync packages but I started using Touchdown with an Exchange account after many months of trying with desktop sync. This was around 2010 so many things have improved... I do remember CompanionLink used to deleted one random contact every time I sync'd it to Outlook. I will say, if you do not mind hosting your own EAS server, Touchdown is the best EAS app on the market. It is the only EAS app that I know of that actually supports the entire spec as of v16.