I regard “smart” as an epithet I want to avoid in appliances. Light switches, thermostats, refrigerators, and all the rest seem to work great without adding internet connectivity, security breaches, corporate surveillance, and vendors removing functionality, or ending support to turn the appliance into e-waste.
I really hate video, prefer reading. But by reading the material to a camera, people get paid by youtube, and then set up a patreon for buying access to the material they read. Everybody loses, hooray:-(
For me, the key is FOSS. I was a keen fan of swiftkey, its word predictions worked great. Then it was bought by a company that I distrust, and when I was forced to choose another, I decided to try to ensure I’d never have to switch again.
A little while after I bailed on swiftkey, the news reports came that it was auto-filling random strangers’ credit card numbers; I felt vindicated.
I’ve got three soft keyboards enabled on my phone, to choose between as needed.
Unexpected Keyboard is my default; it’s a perfectly cromulent basic keyboard, that makes all the punctuation, ctrl/fn/esc available for comfy shell work.
When I need to type in non-ascii characters like accented letters, I have AnySoft available. And pwsafe has a soft keyboard in it to let me avoid passing my (exceedingly hard to type, long random) passwords through the clipboard.
I used to have Hacker’s Keyboard in the mix, but Unexpected Keyboard has made it unnecessary.
With “Unexpected Keyboard” (from f-droid) it’s ok. I’ve come to expect that there’s a basic choice between easy, with GUI, and powerful (like “sort a region of lines”), which is only GUI if you’ve got a powerful GUI, like plan 9. Otherwise, powerful means keyboard-driven.
When I’ve got a long, complex edit, I’ve got a nice, pocket-size, battery-powered folding bluetooth keyboard; combined with the kickstands on my phone cases, it is pretty good.
I use jove (a small, lightweight emacs) within Termux, and M-X filter-region through sort
I’d love one. Preferably the opens-like-a-book style, not the vertical ribbon.
But I don’t want to carry around something that costs that much. They’re currently priced for someone with way more money.
Derek Lowe has some explanation:
If you skip updates long enough, someone might find a security hole, and if you’ve skipped the update that fixes it, you’ll be able to jailbreak it, install koreader, read epubs without conversion, use the filesystem for ebook organization.
Also, you’ll avoid advertisements, which Amazon is now pushing to the homescreens even of kindles that were bought with the extra-cost no-ads option.
since podcasts are I think just RSS feeds of audio files (mp3 for those I’ve checked) the ads aren’t in any way marked in the stream. The only thing I’ve found is adjusting the skip buttons in antennapod so that skip fwd does 10 seconds, and back does 5; that seems to let me avoid listening to most of the ad; tap fwd until it’s back in material, then back once.
But I listen to a lot less podcasts; if I want hands- and eyes-free material I’m more likely to use TTS in my (text) RSS feed reader of choice, currently Feeder.
Kindle isn’t based on Android; it’s bare Linux with heavy DRM and a very limited ebook reader app on it. Whether the MacOS kindle app would help, I don’t know.
That looks like an app for playing audiobooks; I’ve used Voice Audiobook Player from f-droid for that.
If what you want is the recorded performance of someone reading a book, then yeah, librivox for legal audiobooks, and other commentors have other amswers that are on-topic. But DRM-free ebooks — text things, like epubs — can be read aloud by good ereader apps. I like Moon+ Reader Pro from Google Play, and Cool Reader from f-droid. For me, the emotionless robotic reading of TTS engines is more like a hands- and eyes-free way to enjoy the author’s words as written; I find listening to someone performing an audio reading of the book a different experience.
Before ebook reader apps learned about TTS I used to take my txt ebooks, feed them through flite (Festival Lite), then convert the resulting audio to ogg vorbis and load them on an iRiver PMP to play during long drives.
I’m in a similar situation. My Pixel3 is the only phone I have that can install a banking app, but my Nexus 6 still gets monthly security updates via LineageOS. Since Google wants me to repla e phones every few years, when one of these dies, I’m getting an A14 5G. On a cost per year of running everything including apps that block custom ROMs, Pixels are far too pricey. I think they envy Apple their pricing, but don’t do support.
And as long as I’ll have to get a phone, I want newer radios.
Hooray, it includes SingleFile!