OK, perhaps I'm *not* getting a Pixel phone as soon as I thought, the 'delivery Thursday' from Amazon has changed to 'we'll e-mail you when we have a delivery date'.

Can't say I'm fussed, I'm waiting for the Clicks case anyway and not in a rush to move. Looks like the promotion has been a tiny bit too popular - out of stock direct from Google too, even without the 340 quid discount.

Well, that is what happens when you charge a ludicrous price for a phone including take the piss unexpandable flash memory pricing, then discount it so something still nose bleedingly expensive but in the same ballpark as the boutique FXTec Pro 1 I bought some years ago.

In retrospect the best option would have been a Blackberry KeyTWO - it worked and the Blackberry offshoot did actually provide security fixes for some time. However, given that Blackberry screwed me with a phone that was only usable for one year, they weren't getting any more of my money.

It's not really going well.. Blackberry : on the blocklist, not that that helps. Fxtec : Ditto. Unihertz : again. Will Google and Clicks be the one to break the mould?

To be fair Fxtec haven't been such arses, it's just that landscape phones just aren't usable any more for many apps, they don't sell new power boards so the USB port is an utter pain to repair, and they're too small so again you have to suffer with occasional random reboots. It needs a large company to fix stuff such as that.

Actually I tell a lie - the Priv was an excellent phone - for a while.

For the short period after Blackberry used its non inconsiderable resources to fix things such as the phone overheating (by throttling) and random reboots, but before they discontinued security fixes and the hardware started to fail the Priv was a stunning phone.

High res, decent slide away keyboard, portrait, software that they'd actually taken time and care with and thought *how end users would actually use the phone* :O

Pity they threw away all my goodwill with poor support.

Looking at past orders I paid 300 quid in Black Friday for one year of support - which is poor.

Then again the Fxtec Pro 1 cost twice the price, is mostly not as good, and I've had 2-3 screen replacements as its smooth case makes it far too easy to drop.

The last phone I truly loved was the Xperia Pro in 2012. Landscape before the apps I wanted really needed portrait, decent keyboard, removable battery, wireless that worked.

Still use it for authentication for work and work calls. Sadly it's 3G only so that stops with 3G switch off in August. Once I get the Pixel I'll reformat the Titan and use that instead. It has a big battery (although it's failing), so for a phone that will rarely actually be used and won't go on the Internet it'll be fine.

I see phones are now going down the route of removing micro SD expansion so they can shaft you on storage. Not happy with this, but there really is no other option.

Going to learn from past mistakes too - this time the USB charging is going to use a magnetic charger from day one, and I'll be looking at a wireless charger too.

Time will tell how long this phone lasts. Only got a year or so out of the Blackberry Priv, a couple out of the Fxtec Pro 1, and the Titan on and off for five years but it's only recently it had a third party build with more up to date security fixes

I've been trying to avoid Amazon, but it's Prime Day and 30% discount on a Pixel 9 Pro is difficult to ignore! Clicks case ordered as well.

It's still somewhat more than I would prefer to pay but that's the price of a wanting a phone with a keyboard. Clicks also support iPhone (no thank you), and Motorola Razr - which looks *great*, but I don't trust a phone with a folding screen to last.

The only other option is the Unihertz Titan 2 kickstarter which is very cheap, but Unihertz have only committed to one year of security fixes and Android updates, the square screen leads to a lot of Android software incompatibility, and the original Titan has the worst wireless I've seen in any device for a long, long time.

I did at least write an 'hello world and clear the screen' program just to confirm it's working fine under C and yes, it is.

Although, being a PCW with roller RAM and a slow Z80 I think it would be faster than using BASIC, but you can still see the hello world briefly before the screen clears. Unlikely to be something that you'd have time to notice on even a low end x86 processor.

Tonight in CP/M development, trying to get 'S' (vi clone) working on an Amstrad PCW. Definite Fail. It compiles OK, but is designed for a VT100 terminal and makes a *lot* of VT100 assumptions. Unfortunately the PCW uses control codes fairly similar to a VT52 and it doesn't map cleanly (in particular, the VT100 appears to have the concept of 'insert and shift characters to the right'. VT52 does not).

Giving up for now, will put it on the backlog. The TE editor works fine, as does using a native editor and copying into the emulator.

Onwards to GSX fiddling..

This also begs the question on real hardware, it would be *staggeringly* useful to have an N: drive that is the same regardless of the user number you're in.

I don't remember this being a thing at the time in the 80s, but this is such an obvious thing to think of I can't have been the first person, and someone must have done it already, surely?

Making a bit more of an effort to set up an Amstrad PCW CP/M & assembly development environment with various C compilers.

CP/M Box is making this a lot easier, particularly with UIDE hard disk support, and also M: drive to local hard drive mapping. A mapping that is always there - regardless of user number it always maps to the same directory, relieves *so much pain*.

If you were trying to do it on real hardware it'd require so much disk swapping and use of PIP