MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

going gentle into that black(berry) night

published: 2-6-2019

“Someday, we won’t have to fight like this!”

cmccabe at the Zaibatsu recently wrote a post in which he talks about how his work forced him to trade in his BlackBerry phone with a physical keyboard in exchange for an iPhone. It struck a particular cord of nostalgia in me: I used to have an old BlackBery phone, a Curve of some sort, which died when the trackpad stopped working and my father made me get an Android phone to replace it.

It was a good phone. Tiny, but not unusable, since the physical keyboard put me lightyears ahead of my peers in terms of writing speed. There were barely any usable apps for it: some kind of tattoo parlor game, and a shoddy WordPress client, and Twitter. I made do with the built-in apps for everything else: since this was back when my original blog on Blogger was in use, I used the email-in method to post posts there with the email client. The physical pause/play/skip buttons on the top of the device were beautifully integrated with the music player, and not even my tiny mp3 player, let alone any Android music player interface, could hope to replicate the sheer comfort that device brought me. There was even a little word processor, although the free version didn’t have the ability to create new documents, which meant I had to keep a blank document on my device and abuse the Save As function to bypass that limitation.

It was a different time back then. The phone arrived in the mail during the school day, so I got home before my father, and he sternly ordered me to only plug it in to charge and to NOT TOUCH IT until he got back home to activate it. Despite his words, I played around with it a little, getting a good feel for the trackpad. He didn’t notice, or, if he did, he didn’t say anything.

The only real improvement all my Android phones, former and current, have over that device is the front-facing flash next to the camera (and the camera quality itself). The Curve didn’t have a flash, so most of the flashlight apps either glitched when they tried to activate the nonexistent hardware or just outright didn’t work at all. And the video quality was absolute garbage. Although thirteen-year-old me did have a blast downloading YouTube Poop-esque videos on the family computer and converting them to small mp4’s that the device’s video player would understand.

Had I access to my bank account credentials, I would swoop on over to Amazon (despite Bezos bringing me disgust) and buy another Curve in a heartbeat. Or at least heavily consider it, since the device apparently hasn’t had a system update since 2013, and the Blackberry App Store is shutting down at the end of this year. And no XMPP or Matrix client or GPG handler would be a problem, too… The closest thing to the best of both worlds would be a BlackBerry Key2, which is essentially “here’s an Android phone with a keyboard”, but I can’t possibly afford the exorbiant prices, and the reviews complain about unremovable Google bloat and issues with receiving text messages.

In terms of mobile creative potential and control over the device, my old Android tablet seems to be the best overall: I have a Bluetooth keyboard for it, and it’s rooted, and I’ve completely debloated it of everything Google. I have Debian running on it, and although Byobu doesn’t work without glitching the screen, it works fine for Nano and SSH. Other than that, as cmccabe suggests, a notebook and pen might be the best option going forward.

A perfect phone, to me, would be one with the same form factor as the Curve, but with actual Matrix/XMPP/SSH clients. Or at least some kind of terminal emulator with package management, like I have on Android with Termux, so I could write some Python on the go to replace everything I couldn’t install natively. Just functional enough that it’s worth my time, but not so functional with Discord and Tumblr or any of the other Web 3.0 social network surveillance that almost led to my downfall. A tool that I use, instead of it using me.