Vendor dependencies¶
My telephone started acting weird. After roughly 20 months use time it randomly shut down, restarted or just reported a connectivity that was not really there. People not being able to reach me was the result. Honestly: I dropped it a couple of times. Some times nothing happened, than errors appeared which disappeared after the next drop a couple of weeks later.
Luckily a replacement has already been ordered and I am waiting for the release around end of November.
In the meantime: I switched back to my old Palm Pre 3 I was using until end of 2012. Probably the best phone I ever had. It might even be the best phone that I ever will have. But it had one major flaw: It depended on infrastructure from a single source. HP. They not even made the brilliant move to connect it to their server system, they also announced to discontinue the Palm Pre 3 like one day after they had launched it and basically killed all alternatives to Android and iPhone OS. As long as the servers on their side were running, that was not a problem.
Finally, this year in March 2015 the latest servers supporting the WEB OS platform were shut down. Since I was not using the phone at that time, all the shutdown-announcements and trouble notices passed by without any notice.
So when I took the phone back into usage, the software sources where gone and no updates available any more. Brilliant.
In addition there were some precious short messages on that phone. It took me four hours to figure out how to export those messages. Four hours to get my messages from my phone. At the end I figured that the community has stepped in to provide alternative means of source distribution beyond the original vendor. They provided and still provide packages and upgrades. That way the task of compiling the required application and dependencies passed me.
Some major components I build on during the last years are not supported and some procedural gaps are far to wide to consider stepping back to it permanently. But it teaches me a lesson regarding vendor dependency and relying on services you do not control.
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