The last Shield had Play, and also has its own curated app showplace - that just links to the Play Store to actually buy the games.

Wait, what marking on the Q10 isn't implemented in software? All the printing on all the keys on mine are for things it actually does. I don't have any mechanical problems with mine, though I do have an issue with the battery compartment. (It's slightly too big. Drop the phone just so, and it reboots. They'd fix it, but I just stuck a paper shim in there. It's not worth the hassle of sending it in.)

The thing that gets me, is that in most Android apps on it, you can't press the Sym key and then touch the screen for a symbol - you have to press the physical key that maps to it. Which is okay once you figure that out, but rather frustrating until you do, especially for little-used symbols.

I read an article a while back about 'why no keyboard phones' and the writer interviewed a high-up at Sprint, who basically said it's because no one comparison shops phones any more. They used to walk in and go 'I want an iPhone', so we sold them that, or 'I want an Android' and they would look at all the phones we had. Now it's 'I want an iPhone' or 'I want a Samsung Galaxy' or other halo phone. They buy the heavily-advertised models, and don't actually check features.

People who need to land tons of rescue supplies into a flood zone or other disaster area where there are no runways, or the runways have been destroyed.

I can also see a market for these in areas with lots of small-to-medium inhabited islands, that don't have an airstrip big enough for conventional cargo planes, for the occasional high-bulk, time-sensitive cargo. (Medical equipment, for instance. Replacement engines for a ship.)

Pale Moon looks like what I really want in a browser, but there's no Mac version.

Does anyone know of a similar project for Macs?

There are certainly tablet games that benefit from more power.

Riptide GP2, for instance, uses a lot of water and transparency effects. It's a jetski racing game. It has a Tegra 4-optimized version and also supports the Shield controller properly.

The Mass Effect shooter looks better on a Tegra device, though I doubt it'll be updated for K1. Shadowgun or its sequels might be.

Quite a few games have nVidia Tegra-specific versions, and major publishers have been backporting Shield controller support into titles.

Games ported from consoles tend to benefit from the faster GPU as well. Much better draw distance in GTA: San Andreas, and high-res HD texture packs in The Bard's Tale.

And frankly, emulators can use every bit of oomph you can throw at them. I've got consoles up through the Dreamcast and PSP emulated on my Shield. Once you have more power than the minimum needed to run the game you can enable better filters, upscaling, and so on.

Einstein, especially, needs multiple fast CPU cores to run well. (That's an Apple Newton emulator.)

And once you get into the kind of processing power offered by the latest mobile chipsets you can start running PC software. I have DOSbox on my handheld, and have Windows 98 running in Qemu. Windows is mostly just a 'see what I can do?', but I do use DOSbox to play games. (I installed it so I could play Dungeon Keeper, because screw the mobile version.)

They really aren't. Trying to get Amiga software working on an Amiga is often a pain in the ass.

Got a different revision Kickstart chip? No game for you. Got the right Kickstart but any RAM config other than 512K Chip / 512K Trapdoor FAST? No game for you. Got an Amiga that's not a 500? No game. Got an aftermarket video card? Sorry. Sound card? Well, it won't crash, but the game won't use it.

'System legal' Amiga software was pretty solid on different models, but any game written for an A500 or A1200, you were shooting craps if it'd run or not.

I had an Amiga 3000 Tower/040 with 29 megs of RAM (yes, 29), a Cybervision3D video card, Quicknet ethernet, and a 386 BridgeBoard, and frankly I had an easier time getting MS-DOS and Mac games (using Shapeshifter) running than Amiga games.

For that matter, it's easier running them now on my Sam440ep/flex based Amiga by right-clicking them and picking 'Run In UAE' from the menu.

On the other hand, I could easily have supplemented my income by renting the A3000T's case out as an efficiency apartment for a family of four, so it did have that going for it.

And it was a hell of a machine for Pagestream and Photogenics. (Both of which I still use, actually. But on the PPC Amiga, or in WinUAE.)

I wonder why they don't make one with color e-ink? It's more expensive, but it's certainly out there.

You might be surprised. Pretty much everyone I know with a fairly new car that's been well maintained and has over 100,000 miles says they expect to get to 200,000 easily.

Cars simply last a lot longer these days than they used to.

Actually, it takes a long, long time to get your Model S battery swapped.

Since none of the battery swap stations are actually open, you'll have to sit there and twiddle your thumbs till they finish building it.

Except you can't get it any more. The only e-ink Nook left is the Nook GlowLight, which removed both the MicroSD card slot AND the physical page-turn buttons.

Me, I'm hanging onto my Bookeen Cybook Opus. It actually has buttons instead of a touchscreen. I don't need gestures, swipes, and text entry. I need 'push here for next page' and 'push here for previous page' and a D-pad for selecting books and working menus.

I've tried the Nook and Kindle touch readers, and they drive me absolutely batshit insane. Touch.. touch... I want the next page. TOUCH. *pagepage* no that was TWO pages. Damnit.

(My Opus can also handle both MobiPocket and ePub, though not both at the same time; it's a firmware flash to switch it. Annoying, but when I started with ebooks MobiPocket was the dominant format.)

That said, the Nook HD+ tablets are actually pretty good hardware, and very simple to reflash with CyanogenMod.

I wonder if anyone makes an e-ink reader with a frontlight AND page-turn buttons? Bookeen lists one, but I can't actually find it for sale anywhere.

I read an interview with a high-up at Sprint that said the reason Android keyboard phones have died is that people no longer go to the phone store and go 'I want an Android phone' and look at features.

They walk in and go 'I want a Galaxy S5' or 'I want an HTC One' or other heavily-advertised halo phone, and never even consider other options. Not even things like non-name-brand phones which might have almost the same specs for a lot less money.

It's probably worth noting that the Z10 is a replaced model. Previous-gen flagship phones often get insane promos when the newer one's been out for a while, and the Z30 came out last November.

And actually, if AT&T was going to charge $100 per iPhone, they may have actually made more money by giving you Z10s - retail price on the Z10 is $300 now (direct from BB), which is a lot less than an iPhone.

I bought a Q10 because I wanted a keyboard. I'd never used a BB before.

I love the thing. Trying to use an Android or iPhone now drives me batty. Losing the Hub is the worst part.

Android apps on the Q10 are problematic, though. Even apps that work on the Z10 often fail on the Q10. Apparently the apps can't handle 'Is the phone in landscape or portrait?' 'Yes'. (The Q10 has a perfectly square screen.)

I hear this from people who drive a stick all the time, and I've never understood it.

When I drive a stick, if I'm starting on a hill I pull the parking brake with my hand, keeping the button held in so it didn't latch, and not release it till I had enough traction with the engine to support the car so it didn't roll backwards.

Doesn't anyone else do this?

And as far as wanting a transmission that doesn't shift, you can get CVTs on non-hybrids, too. Most of them, however, are programmed to mimic an automatic's shift pattern because it's what people expect.

You can play 'original source' high-def disc rips on your Android? I can't even copy the files to mine - they're too big for the internal storage, and they can't go on the FAT32 formatted SD card.