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Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Cosmo as a daily driver - experiences/review
« on: February 17, 2020, 12:40:20 pm »
I've now been using Cosmo as a daily driver for a week now. I wanted to write a short summary on my experiences and things that I've picked up especially since I came from Nokia N900 (Maemo). Some of this is really basic Android stuff of course.
I'll start with the bad, since those points are rather small overall:
I'll start with the bad, since those points are rather small overall:
- Planet Computer's communication and delays - not exactly the most responsive manufacturer.
- Device is a bit too big and heavy. Trying to use this for prolonger periods of time results in pain on the wrist due to the static strain (holding that 320 g on one hand while touching or typing with the other). On weekend, I spent a two-hour car (as a passenger) passing time and by the end my left hand was sore. For quick checks or with a table to place the device - no problems whatsoever. I would have preferred a bit more compact keyboard, but it's not like there's much options in this space...
- Certain stuff needs a bit more finish: Cover display likes to keep the CPU awake, costing power, the LEDs don't seem to really be customizable, documentation is missing...these will probably be fixed down the line. Right now I can get my battery to last for two full days, so it's okay-ish.
- I haven't yet figured what exactly would be the best way to open the phone. The device is heavy but there doesn't seem to be any obvious indentations for "grab here to open". So I'll just lift the cover however appears best at the time...
- Community at OESF Forums: Wonderful. Thanks for all the hints, everyone (esp. regarding rooting and Devuan installation).
- I was one of the lucky ones in the sense that my device's construction doesn't seem to have any flaws (no camera glass falling off etc). Hope it sticks.
- Landscape mode Android is not supported on nearly all apps. So far I've just uninstalled if the app shows as ugly. There are plenty of alternatives in play store.
- Related: Many "mobile sites" are apparently built for portrait as well. Workaround is to always request "desktop" view. At least with Firefox, you can use addon or just set your user-agent to spoof a desktop browser.
- My apps so far that I've "settled on" (not counting e.g. games - those are bound to come and go):
- Magisk for rooting. MagiskHide seems to work just fine for my banking app at least.
- SMS Backup & Restore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?...store&hl=en - I wrote a couple of Python scripts to extract my MMS & SMS messages from my N900 and convert them to the XML format of this application. The XML is reasonably readable, so I might keep this even for future backups even if it displays ads.
- Nova launcher. The builtin launcher has the Google search bar, and also does not really seem to work in landscape mode. Also, lots of widgets are not really so good looking with the default launcher.
- Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Teams). So far I've mostly used Outlook & Teams. Outlook's default calendar view doesn't really work properly except in portrait mode, but the widget works. Luckily, supposed "3-day view" that actually shows the entire week works great. Other Office apps work just fine. I've also participated in MS Teams conferences.
- Opencamera for camera works OK although I'm also struggling with what should the settings be (see https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=35912 )
- Notificon: This nice app allows you to customize sounds of notifications and also put them on a weekly/daily schedule. I use this to block MS Office's (work-related) notifications on weekends and outside of business hours. You can also set notification sounds per app if the app doesn't allow you to customize them directly.
- Google Maps seems to be fine for navigation, including in car. Compass seems to work ok-ish even without calibration. I don't have a car mount, but there's a small cubby in my car where I can just put it on the rest.
- Termux for Devuan installation (see thread on the forums) and generic command line hacking around. Unfortunately, Termux doesn't seem to have locale support. I occasionally need to connect to machines that use e.g. ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) charset instead of UTF-8, and end result is ugly if there are any non-ASCII chracters. Due to this, I've also installed ConnectBot SSH client.
- Firefox for browsing, with Saka key & UBlock addons at this point.
- Flym as RSS reader. This one seems to be one of those that support landscape a bit better, although still not quite optimally in my view. Still, works for now.
- Other points
- I have created separate desktops for Work (Contains shortcuts to MS Office, Outlook's Calendar widget etc), Generic (has weather widget from Foreca, file manager, calculator, clock, maps etc), and Fun (essentially games). This approach seems to work for me. The Dock has phone, messaging, contacts, Firefox and Play store (I'll probably remove Play store from there after I have a stable set of apps).
- Creating a throwaway account for Google services and turning off all tracking options is probably the best of all-worlds where I can be part of Android ecosystem while still giving Google as little as possible. Yes, I get it's still a bit silly considering I'm ok with Google maps (even though I turned wifi-based location off), but can't have everything.
- The display text sizes seemed too big despite setting the font sizes to smallest in the settings. Using Fn+Shift+C/Fn+Shift-V you can adjust the text to be small enough.
- As a method to stave off the RSI, I installed Saka key addon to Firefox. This allows (almost) full keyboard-based browsing. This allows me to hold the device with two hands, without having to have the other hand touching the screen. E.g. hitting "ff" will enumerate all clickable elements on a website, each with a letter, that I can just press to follow a link.
=> I haven't been able to find a key combination to move focus to the URL/Location bar! Using CTRL+N (new tab), qq (move to previous tab), CTRL+W as a workaround. - The display is in some cases a bit TOO wide. I also cannot get "reader" view to work on most websites. End result is that sometimes layout is wrong. As a workaround, I use splitscreen to limit the application width. The sad part is that many websites are fixed-width.
- All basic call functions work ok, including conferences etc. Controlling call via CoDi seems to work as well, although I noticed that occasionally my face accidentally hits one of the call control buttons. I've learned to just keep the phone half a cm apart so I don't accidentally hit any of the controls. Would be better if the display would just turn off if by face is touching it. Purpose for the ambient light sensor?