In the 80s/early 90s there was a string of postal workers freaking out and subsequently shooting office co-workers.

Basic web browsing uses almost no data. A friend was able to browse through my lumia last night because her internet was down and 10 minutes of browsing and sending a couple emails didn't even show on the usage summary.

I disagree. Can't remember the article, but somewhere recenly there was an article talking about the average web page size these days being about 1.7M, with 1M of that being images.

Try using a metered service sometime like a prepaid hotspot with 3G or above. You can blow through 100M easily in half an hour just looking at news sites with no video, just images and text.

I have the 840G and still use it as a backup phone. All I really needed to do to make it feel really functional was install Opera Mini and GMaps on it, both of which are installable java apps. The battery lasts forever, too.

An 11 inch device is no less portable than a 10 inch device. And they're making plenty of those in the form of Chromebooks, capable of running complete OSes (I know, I have one). Hell, the very first comment in your link even points that out.

I won't jump to satellite, though. Here's why: I stream a LOT of shows. I mean most of what I watch is done over the internet. I may occasionally have to wait for a buffer to fill, but other than that I have no problems. Satellite comes with bandwidth caps (unless I want to be up all night taking advantage of "free" off-hour bandwidth). With all the shows I watch, I clock in around 50G download, 3-4G upload every month, and that's at the lowest resolution I can get, if and when I have a choice to change it. No way a satellite provider would let me do this month after month, year after year.

Your comment pretty mirrors the (currently) 19 comments on the reg site.

I suppose a lot of people deal with tragedy through humor, but I sure wouldn't want to be a surviving family member and read some of the comments posted so far.

At least you did it anoncowardly.

I went back to a decent feature phone (LG 840G). Cheap, capacitive touch screen (albeit low resolution), no contract, and has WiFi.

I find I use the phone completely differently in a rural area where I am now compared to living in a city when I was on contract. So all I really need is a decent maps app - GMaps touch (J2ME) works fine and a decent browser - Opera Mini, which is sluggish but serviceable.

Until Android can *reliably and consistently* restrict when, where and how network chatter happens, I don't imagine going back. At least not while living in the country,

They're also producing a few new Asha phones that are marketed and sold in developing countries. From what I understand, the OS is based on a souped up version of S40 (or maybe S60?). I think they're meant to compete with the Firefox OS phones coming out.

For low end phones, they look pretty decent.

Both the headline and the summary are just laziness.

Had the submitter taken 5 minutes and done a search, he would have found plenty of software available - and cross-platform at that - to do what he wants.

Or maybe it was just an excuse to link to his soundcloud page?

Actually, this phone could work well for some prepaid markets in the US, too. Well, I should say it *could have* worked. I think it's too late now, but not by much - less than half a year.

I have an LG 840G that's roughly the same specs on tracfone for when I'm at my cabin. Tracfone seems to be the only thing that works consistently in the middle of the woods. Anyway, tracfone could have added that to its line of phones and I bet it would have sold like hotcakes. But as of last month, tracfone now offers a couple of low-end android phones for half the price (ZTE and Samsung) with better specs.

The TV system *is* being replaced, albeit slowly with something else: the internet. There was a time when all TV was used for was news and weather. Most people don't sit down in front of the TV for news these days (and no, opinion is not news). They get their news from the internet. People get entertainment from TV these days.

And, don't look now, but we've already been trained to believe the internet is a necessity in our lives.

Does HBO even have an hour of watchable programming every night? Sure, there are certain nights of the week that there's a good program on, but I would only be watching maybe two shows that HBO produces, meaning 2 hours a week.

I get the hate, at least up until now. It's the horrible reliance on compiz. Way too many parts that can (and do) break on updates.

Or, as it's currently called, MTurk.

I still have a Nokia N800 that I occasionally use. I also bought a BenQ S6 on closeout not that long ago. They both have about the same form factor, run full Linux, can take SD cards, similar battery time, etc., but the BenQ has an atom processor in it. I pick that machine up way more than the N800, because as old as it is (truthfully, it came out after the N800), it's WAY easier to find applications for it - still running a 2.6.22 kernel, no less. It's become a total hassle to find updated programs for the N800, whereas it's not so much of a problem with the BenQ.

I honestly wouldn't mind updating the BenQ to some more modern distribution, but I still get plenty of use out of the older, Redhat-based distribution.