The best thing about getting an Android phone

[mmcirvin]

Droid48 is like coming home.

(My HP-48SX got stolen over a decade ago. I still have my 1980s-vintage 28S, as featured in my zeroth Usenet post, but the batteries for it are almost impossible to find and the battery door is falling off.)

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Of course, for fancy symbolic calculations you probably really want to get the Wolfram Alpha app for a buck 99, or use the web interface for free.

[kodi]

Yeah, I absolutely love Droid48. I still have a 48GX, bought after my 48SX was stolen in '92, but a battery acid leak killed it. I always thought the SX was prettier, though.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I preferred the 28S's clamshell keyboard layout, which reduced the number of shift keys you needed.

One slightly awkward thing about Droid48 is that if the phone has a real QWERTY keyboard, the keys are apparently mapped to the calculator keys with the corresponding letters very literally, such that they do more or less random things if you don't hit alpha. The emulator ought to assume you mean alpha if you just start thumb-typing; that would be more useful.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I guess the current behavior does give trig functions and such fast shortcuts, once you get used to them.

[kodi]

AH! I never even made the connection that the keys were mapped to the keys they would be for alpha. I only got as far as "wow, that seems to be completely random."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It pays absolutely no mind to whatever physical shift/alt keys you might have, as opposed to its simulations of the weird HP ones, so I unfortunately can't use the +-x÷ symbols on my keyboard to do the obvious things. A more sophisticated keyboard mapping all round seems like an obvious enhancement, especially since the pretend keys on the touchscreen can be pretty small.

Also, I realize I've forgotten how to do anything very tricky on the 48. Wolfram Alpha probably makes a lot of it obsolete anyway, since you can type in fairly informal queries there and it will guess what you want. Whereas Droid48 is still useful when you just want an RPN calculator, or you want to work with stored expressions.

[kodi]

Yeah, I did get as far as realizing that the alt/shift keys did nothing, and that the only way to accurately type a number was to be very, very cautious when I was poking at the number keys. And then keys started falling off my physical keyboard, and these days I just use the screen for everything. I hate not having a good physical keyboard on my phone, but sadly the keyboard on the Droid was never good even before it was broken.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's actually what prevented me from switching to a modern smartphone for a long time, but events forced my hand at the same time that a solution presented itself.

Though I haven't talked about it here much if at all, I used to work for Danger, the original designers and software/service providers for the T-Mobile Sidekick. So I carried a Sidekick, usually the model I happened to be working on, and I was happy because the Sidekick, for all its Paris Hilton image and sometimes low-end specs, had the best QWERTY keyboard of any cell phone. When I started using one, I realized that I might have to keep using one on my own dime if I ever lost that job. Sure enough, when I wasn't working there any more, I kept carrying one for as long as I could.

Well, Microsoft (owners of what used to be Danger) just turned off the back-end service that the Sidekick depended on for good, so I had to move on. Fortunately, T-Mobile (owners of the Sidekick brand) decided to revive the Sidekick as a Samsung Android 4G device, with no Danger IP but with a keyboard amazingly similar to the old one, with five full rows of keys in a decent thumb-typing layout, including number keys separate from the QWERTY keys.

I've had it for less than a day now, but I'm liking it so far. I don't yet know how durable it is, of course. The one thing that trips me up is the new Voice Actions key that is right next to the right shift key; I keep hitting it when I'm typing.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...It also fixes a corollary weakness of the old Sidekick: because it had no touchscreen, it was awkward to dial it for a plain old phone call. The only way to dial a phone number with the keyboard closed was with an onscreen keypad operated with the trackball, which nobody used. The new one, of course, just uses the regular Android phone app with its touchscreen keypad.

[kodi]

Yeah, I stuck with the Sidekick as long as I lived in Dallas, where T-Mobile's service was reasonably good. But then I moved to NJ, and didn't get reliable service in my apartment, and there was a 20-minute dead spot along my bus commute, so I pretty much had to switch to Verizon and a crappy keyboard. I'm to the point now where I only slide the keyboard out to show people the missing keys; I'm reasonably happy with Swype. I still miss being able to touch-type on my phone, though.

(And I did spitefully dial a number using only the scroll-wheel, once.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The other thing about the new phones is that they support both wifi data and wifi calling (T-Mo still takes it off your minutes, though). So their spotty coverage is less of an issue. I do wonder what the AT&T merger is going to do.

[kodi]

Ah! But now I know that tapping the LCD portion of the emulator will toggle "minimal input" mode, which makes it much easier to type in numbers accurately.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I also rather like the rearranged layout they came up with for landscape mode. It's like an HP-15C on steroids.

I showed Jorie (who is 4) this, the stock Android calculator, and the Wolfram Alpha app. I'm teaching her about addition, so she has an inkling of what calculators are for, and I demonstrated the different ways of doing an addition problem on them. Today I handed her the phone so she could play Angry Birds, and when I checked on her again she was using the Wolfram supercomputer cluster to add single-digit numbers.