Jesse
evacideAre we doing burner phone discourse now? Fine. A Burner phone is a phone belonging to a Bay Area tech worker who won't shut up about Burning Man. You will never see them at a protest where they have even the slightest chance of being arrested.
Matt Blaze@evacide Ouch!
@mattblaze Fortunately at the time I was a Bay Area techie who couldn't shut up about Burning Man, I was twenty and the smartphone had not been invented.
@evacide So lucky not to have had a smartphone when I was 20.
Chris Petrilli@mattblaze @evacide the lack of camera phone and digital cameras in general in my youth is… whew, let me just say a small blessing?
Joe@mattblaze @evacide I didn't have a smartphone in my 20s, but I had Usenet. So thankful to Henry Spencer for deciding that soc.singles wasn't worth archiving. We posted so much stupid embarrassing stuff with our real names attached.
Kurt Weiske@evacide @mattblaze When my friends were at Burning Man, Apple QuickTake cameras were all the rage - that's as close to social as it got. :)
Juho MäntysaloI know this was just turn of phrase, but Nokia Communicator came out in 1996, and wasn't the first on the market.
This is to say, you certainly don't look old enough to be 50 :)
Kuba =)K@iju I wonder what was your motivation to write this ^^^ message.
Thank you for asking!
1. Many people in the States only refer to "smartphones" those published after Iphone (even though iphone wasn't even a smartphone).
2. I like talking about Nokia Communicators, I think they're supercool, and like to use excuses to put up photos about them.
3. I honestly wasn't sure to what timeline we were referring to, as a tech person is most likely to use the technical definition (which famously is the best definition: a phone you can install apps to).
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@iju @kuba In the late '90s, the terminology split the market into three categories:
- Smartphones. Users could download and run apps from multiple vendors.
- Featurephones. Often ran the same OS as a smartphone but didn't have storage space for third-party apps and were limited to the ones provided by the vendor.
- Dumbphones, didn't run anything that a user would recognise as multiple applications (had an address book, made calls, sent and received SMS, did nothing else).
The original iPhone was a featurephone. It could not run third-party apps, only web apps or Apple-bundled things.
There were a lot of smartphones before the iPhone launched. Nokia's Symbian lines were popular (Nokia had 70% of the smartphone market) but there were also Windows Mobile devices (not to be confused with Windows Phone, which actually had a nice UI: Windows Mobile had a start button and required a stylus) and a bunch of other smaller options.
Realistically though, most of them were pretty terrible. I owned a few and, even though they could run third-party software, actually doing so was painful and much of it was buggy. They were slow and, before capacitative touch screens became cheap (the iPhone was enabled by this and was one of the first half dozen or so devices to use one) the interfaces were terrible.
The duopoly of Android and iOS makes me sad.
Yeah, I had few of those Symbian phones as well.
But all in all, you reached my mind space well, and the reason I wrote above.
Felt a bit strange how the above person asked for clarification, but I can't live based on what people in other cultures think!
Magnus Ahltorp@david_chisnall @iju @kuba According to Nokia’s 2000 terminology, there were four things: PDAs, PDAs with phone functionality, smartphones and traditional phones.
Smartphones meant traditional phones with a little bit of app-iness to them. That was what they focused on. What we now call a smartphone is what Nokia ignored, which is a PDA with phone functionality. Which is why Nokia completely failed.
The iPhone has been a PDA from the beginning, it’s virtually unchanged since then.
jb@evacide @mattblaze My dear, we all have embarrassing times. Some are the laser portraits of the 1980s, others are feeling like Burning Man is a reality.
If it didn't end up being more Wired than Mondo 2000...
@jb @mattblaze To be fair, you were around for the 20-year old version of me that wouldn't shut up about Burning Man.
@evacide @mattblaze well, I do still like you, and it didn’t stunt your growth.
Patrick Herd@evacide I needed that belly laugh today. Thank you. Also OW from sciatica.
AN/CRM-114@evacide any relation to the Fyre phone? They did that once and it…. didn’t go so well
Evan Prodromou@evacide cracked screen, dead battery, covered in alkali dust, razor marks on the screen protector, Bianca's Smut Shack sticker, empty thimble-sized baggie wedged carefully under the case
Gabriel Viso Carrera@evacide I thought it was a phone you could throw to a swasticar for it to catch fire. Damn, back to the bottles then!
Cullen Thomas@evacide I appreciate this post on so many levels. This is poetry.
Ada (Villain arc) 🏳️⚧️@evacide It's called a burner phone because you can start a fire with it. /J
ideaPDish
naugtur
ErgonWolf@evacide Well, unless you clone their number and do some shady shit to implicate them....
delProfundo
naught101@evacide There are at least three of us!
I've not been to BM, but to a few regional burns in Australia (I also have long arrest history for protest). I know a few others in the same boat.
But yeah, you're not wrong in general. There's a lot of reality disconnect.
Karl Heinz Häsliprinz@evacide The pyros from Parabol of the Sower are those Burners.
LisPi@evacide @becomethewaifu They were a vaguely more practical concept when it was possible to physically remove the batteries and ubiquitous surveillance of sale endpoints wasn't basically a given.