[T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide] Blue6IX:
Which makes me want to buy one.

I don't really feel like devving for my S3 because every time i've needed to do something it's already been done.

At the point where every day I have to defer the OTA because I havent felt like figuring out how to disable it. (It's rooted with a cwm, so OTA won't install, but it nags me to install daily.)

I mean I got root, eliminated some bloat, tweaked a couple settings here and there as I have been going through it, then installed cwm to block the OTA, but my motivation to do anything to it is non-existent. Just feels like it's all been done before.

Not that i've had a lot of time recently, but mostly all of it has been spent on the doubleshot.

The other one is a popular phone that's been out for a while. There really aren't a lot of dev challenges to awaken the device and free it from the manufacturer/carrier lockdown.

I'm definitely not done with learning how to get around that aspect of smart phone existence, and the way htc and t-mobile burned us on the doubleshot still presents a lot of learning opportunities. In the future when I do upgrade from the doubleshot to a new device i'll hit the ground running and just do what I want from the device launch. Learned (and learning!) the process of what's needed from launch to full custom ROM has been very enlightening on the doubleshot thus far.

The packet-switching technique baked into the HTC kernel was epic. When I found that drifting through source, and then tracked down all it's pieces and got to see the puzzle put together - well damn.

The relay being a samsung makes it instantly more dev accessible, truthfully the carrier is the biggest roadblock to freely devving on the device. You can pull on a larger pool of knowledge across xda for beating that then combined with manufacturer hindrances deliberately placed at the level htc employs.

Between what i've owned and what i've experienced, the quality of the physical device from HTC is the highest on the market. From a dev standpoint, that is the most important factor in my opinion. The thought is that we can fix software issues, but are stuck with hardware problems.

(to that end my education is leading me further into hardware and building computers chip by chip - got a raspberry pi and stuff like that to explore now...but a subject of another discussion)

HTC needs to make the next evolution of the doubleshot. Quad core S4 with at least 2 gigs of ram and a better keyboard then this one. Goodbye genius button, hello search button, and get rid of the damn question mark as a primary key. NFC capable. TV out mandatory. I'd be on it at full retail price for 3 of them at launch day. 2 for me, one for my lady - so one for me to dev on and one to use.

The relay is almost it...but i've got no desire to move from the doubleshot to it, just not enough more to justify it. I'll probably buy one in a few months secondhand to dev on so I can participate in the next solid hardware keyboard device while we wait for the generation after to have one.

When the doubleshot devs and relay devs upgrade to the generation after hardware keyboard device, we are gonna own it. All the other people floating around out there who skipped the doubleshot/relay keyboard phones and miss their G2 will want another one like it. Predicting the future is never an exact science, but what I see in culture and trend gives me that feeling.

My biggest gripe about the S3 is losing all of the hardware keyboard shortcuts. NFC offsets that a little bit, but it destroys a significant asset in navigating and using android fluently and quickly. Tapping your way to something you can just tap a two-button sequence for is like a school zone dumped on a 70 m.p.h. speed limit road.

If another hardware keyboard device doesn't come out by a year from now, then the relay will be the upgrade when I decide my doubleshot needs NFC. Otherwise i'm probably going to bang on the next one at launch.