inXile - The Bard's Tale - CD version - on Windows 7

Speaking recently of not re-paying for video games, music, etc. that you’ve already payed for just because someone doesn’t feel like supporting it on some new platform that should support it, that brings us to this Thanksgiving’s strangest epic adventures, the battle to install inXile’s The Bard’s Tale on my Windows 7 PC.

You see, many a year ago, when The Bard’s Tale came out, it was Windows XP that PCs used.  But as we all know, Windows 7, whilst theoretically supporting all kinds of backward compatibility options, doesn’t necessarily make things all that easy in reality.  (And Windows Vista, being, well, basically, Win 7 Alpha, has the same problems.  But I like to pretend that Windows Vista AKA Win ME2 doesn’t exist any more than Windows Millennium Edition did.  Some versions of Windows are just a bane upon the world, and Win ME and Win Vista are the two worst, by far.)

So hearken, fellow readers, to this the unofficial penultimate guide to playing The Bard’s Tale on a modern PC.

So what, exactly, is the problem with getting The Bard’s Tale to run on Windows 7?  To start with?  Installing it!

You see, in their infinite wisdom, Microsoft seems to have blocked some good old Widows Media Player APIs / DLLs from Windows 7.  The Bard’s Tale installer checks for them, and cannot find them, and so claims that you don’t have the right version of Windows Media Player 9 needed.  It helpfully offers you an install on the CD, but of course that won’t do you any good whatsoever.  We’re up to Windows Media Player 11, and Microsoft actually blocks those old versions that it doesn’t like anymore on Windows 7.

Not that you actually need the old version of Windows Media Player.  Oh no.  The few .WMV movies that The Bard’s Tale contains will run just fine with the latest version.  It’s just that the installer for The Bard’s Tale is too stupid to know that.  And inXile is too lazy to fix it.

You may have noticed, for a mere ten bucks, you can get The Bard’s Tale on Steam.  And presumably this will install on Windows 7.  But why re-pay for something you already bought?  Surely there’s a solution, right?

Well, there are two roads that you can go down.  (Three, I guess, if you count repaying for what you already own to download it on Steam.)

The key is that there are no registry settings or any such magic (like some programs need) necessary to get The Bard’s Tale running.  All that you actually need are the files.  Files files files.  The installer is supposed to give you those files, but if the installer won’t run, then we just have to do it ourselves.

Method 1) Copy An Install Off Of A Windows XP Box

I know, I know.  That requires you to have a Windows XP box handy.  I verified that this works quite well in a very painful way.  I shared the Blu-Ray drive on my PC over the network to my Viliv S5 UMPC “laptop” so that I could run the installer.  Painful, but doable.  And then having successfully installed The Bard’s Tale I copied the files back over to my Windows 7 box and nuked the install on my Windows XP laptop.  Slow and painful, but successful.  If you have an old Windows XP box around somewhere, you can do it this way too.  (Even more easily if you don’t have to share your CD drive because your Windows XP box doesn’t have one.)

OR there’s always Microsoft’s ultimate solution to Windows XP compatibility:  Windows XP Mode.  It’s essentially a virtual PC running a copy of Windows XP.  Slow and painful, but you don’t need another computer if you have this set up.

Method 2) Unpackage The Files From The CDs Manually

You don’t actually need a Windows XP box or Windows XP Mode to get The Bard’s Tale installed though.  Because you can do the work of the installer yourself!  Each CD has on it a Disk1.cab file.  (Well, okay, technically CD1 has Disk1.cab, CD2 has Disk2.cab, etc.)  And you can extract the files from these cab files easily enough.  I used 7-Zip, which is a great free tool that I use all the time, but I’m sure there are other options too.  Just create your The Bard’s Tale directory and extract the CAB files from each CD into it and you’re almost good to go.

Almost.

First, to help things along, make your The Bard’s Tale directory somewhere not in the typical Program Files structure, because Windows 7 likes to be very protective of these and that can both cause problems extracting your files into there as well as getting The Bard’s Tale to run.  (Though running The Bard’s Tale in Administrator mode fixes that.  Actually, so does running 7-Zip in Administrator mode too, which is easy enough.  But so is just not using the Program Files directory structure in the first place.)

And second, there’s still a vital step missing.  The Bard’s Tale will run, but most of the voices will be missing.  (Even though the sound effects and music are there.)  And since most of what makes The Bard’s Tale entertaining are the conversations, you’ll want to go through this next step.

On Disk 6 is another folder as well, named Sounds.  You have to manually copy these .VWB files into your “The Bard’s Tale\Res\Sounds” folder.  And the WBCWin.exe into it as well.  And then the even more annoying part, these .VWB files are compressed versions that you use WBCWin.exe to uncompress.  You have to go into a command prompt window to do it.  (You’ll want to start your command prompt in administrator mode too, most likely.)  CD to the “The Bard’s Tale\Res\Sounds” directory where you dumped the .VWB files and WBCWin.exe, and then enter the command “WBCWin.exe *.vwb .\” … without the quotes, obviously.  This will take a good while as it uncompresses the .VWB files into much larger .XWB files.

And there you have it, all of the voiceovers for the many many many in-game cutscenes.  You’re now “installed”.

DVD Version Note:

Supposedly the DVD disk version of The Bard’s Tale is much easier to use, as it just has all of the files there for you to copy, flat out.  No painful de-CABing.  No even more painful manual .VWB to .XWB decompression.  Just copy and go.  Not having the DVD version I can’t verify this personally, but that’s the scuttlebutt on Ye Olde Interwebs.

But what else do I need to know?

There’s a few other important steps to playing The Bard’s Tale now that you’ve installed it.  The first is that you’ll probably want to right-click on the EXE and set it up to run in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode.  Just in case.  And heck, while you’re at it, you’ll probably want to create some desktop and/or Start Menu shortcuts or something for yourself too.

The second is that  in “The Bard’s Tale\Config” directory is The Bard’s Setup.exe which you will most definitely want to run.  This is where you change the resolution used by The Bard’s Tale.  The default is a meager 640×480, which looks like crap.  You’ll want to up it as close to your resolution as you can get, most likely.  (Keeping in mind the aspect ratio of your native resolution if you can’t match yours exactly.)

In game you’ll also want to crank down the particles in the video options.  There are even manual hex fixes for this out there, supposedly, as even the lowest particle setting can still grind some scenes down to some very low frames per second.  For the most part though you’ll be fine with just simply reducing this to the lowest setting.

Another important thing to note is that if you play the game and it feels like it’s in slow motion, it is!  But don’t worry, it’s easily fixed.  You can quickly test this by listening to the drunks sing their beer song in the very beginning.  If “follow the bouncing ball” is choppy because it can’t keep up, you’re in slow motion.  The fault of this is … V-Sync.  It reportedly happens more with GeForce video cards than any others.  Fortunately it should be easy enough to turn off.  (These days you should even be able to manually turn V-Sync off just for The Bard’s Tale if it’s something you want on all the rest of the time.)

There’s also a patch for The Bard’s Tale floating about.  Does it do anything?  I don’t know.  I’ve tried it.  Meh.  Heck if I can tell if it actually even fixes anything.  If it even installs.  It’s not very informative.

And last, but certainly not least, there is also floating about the internet a no-CD crack for The Bard’s Tale.  Now being unofficial I can’t say as I support using it.  Because, you know, in theory it violates your warranty?  (On your obviously already out-of-warranty game since it’s six years old by this point.)  Your mileage may vary.  The choice is up to you.  And such crap.  No idea what legality issues using the no-CD crack may constitute, but technologically it’s there, and I’m sure it works just fine.

So there you have it!  The Bard’s Tale on Windows 7!

Even after all these years, it’s still a great game.  You too can install and play The Bard’s Tale on Windows 7, even though it isn’t even remotely supported, and the installer won’t run, and inXile won’t help you in the slightest.  (Let alone actually spend ten seconds fixing their installer with some kind of simple downloadable installer that looks at your CDs/DVDs the same as the original installer should.)  You don’t have to pay on Steam to download the game if you already bought it years ago and still have the disks around.  You just have to be a little more hands-on to get it installed.  Once done, it works just fine. 

Yes, this is a rant. It’s not politically correct. This one perhaps more so than most of mine. If you want to complain, that’s nice. Send all of your complaints here.

Microsoft is the new tabletard.

Microsoft just released the hounds on the Windows 8 NDAs and I think it’s well and good to finally admit that we have a new word: Tabletard. For those unfamiliar with this word, please see commentard, twittard, celebritard, ad nauseum. And no, I do not mean people who are stupid about tables. I mean people who are stupid about tablets. Of which, now, apparently Microsoft is one of them.

Why do I say that Microsoft is a tabletard? Simple, look at what Windows 8 is. Take Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7, mash them together in the worst possible way, and tada! You now have Windows 8.

When first announced that Windows 8 would have a Metro mode and Windows 7 mode (which within this rant I will refuse to use as a term and will from now on call Phone, because that’s all it is), I rather figured that the Phone part would be something gimmicky that you can on the side. Like how Windows 7 has that Windows XP Compatibility mode. Call me crazy, but I had rather assumed that Microsoft was rational enough to comprehend that PC users use PCs. That Windows was the primary OS people want on their Windows box. That the Phone part is just there to run “apps”.

Apparently Microsoft doesn’t get it.

I guess I can’t entirely blame them. Ubuntu obviously missed the boat on that one as well.  More so than Microsoft, by a mile.

Still, it’s rather ludicrous to suddenly assume that every device you ever install your OS on is now a tablet or phone, and that it has no keyboard or mouse. You’d have to be a flipping moron to make that assumption. I mean you would literally need to be mentally retarded to assume that. Hence why Microsoft now joins Canonical (the folks responsible for Ubuntu) amongst the ranks of tabletards.

I’m already sick and tired of Windows 7’s Start Menu. I didn’t like it any better when it was Windows XP’s. The “Classic” Start Menu is what I vastly prefer, because as someone who actually works for a living, I have a lot of applications which I use. There’s simply not enough room in the psychic ever-failing-to-predict Start Menu that Microsoft has been trying to replace the classic Start Menu with forever. I am constantly using the “All Programs” button any time I can’t have my Classic Start Menu. Which is really freaking annoying.

I do not want my icons hidden.  I do not want my Start Menu shrunk.  I have a lot of icons that I need.  I have a lot of programs that I regularly use.  Stop trying to make me click a lot of extra times to do everyday tasks, Microsoft!

Now enter Windows 8, which replaces the bad Start menu with something even worse: Phone! (Remember, I am not calling it Metro.) Yes, that’s right, now a bunch of tiles make up your Start Menu. Tiles which will mostly lack any and all useful information for people like me who will be using Windows to run applications, not Phone “apps”. It takes up even more room. It’s uglier. And it’s even less useful. Huzzah?

Likewise, you get a schizophrenic experience in Windows 8. If you run a Windows application, it operates just like you’d expect. It’s the Windows experience that you know and love. But if you run a Phone app, it runs fullscreen, and with all of the finger-swiping interactivity that you’d come to expect from apps. Will people be able to figure out what to do when the run an app instead of an application?

And the bigger question is, how well will the dichotomy of application/app … aka app(lication) even work when navigating Windows. So far that’s one that people have been keeping rather quiet on. Will Alt-Tab even work at all? How does Aero handle applications vs. apps? Will navigating from within an app be like apps? Will navigating from within an application be like applications? Frankly, even if these questions are answered right now, until the final binaries hits the silicon, I’m not going to believe for a minute that tweaks and refinements won’t happen, or features of navigation change entirely. It’s a messy messy world that Microsoft is creating by treating apps as apps within Windows.  And it’s a mess the way that Microsoft is cramming Windows Phone 7 into Windows 7 and calling it Windows 8.

Seriously, is it so hard to comprehend that most people are not going to find Phone in any way useful on a desktop PC? Now if you want to enable some goofy Phone interface, as an option, I’m all for that. After all, tablet PCs like my Viliv S5 could very well use some finger-friendlier navigational aid. (Something Viliv tried to accomplish with Cube UI, but failed badly.) But again, Phone should be an option, not forced upon everyone. Not everyone has a touchscreen. Not everyone even owns a smartphone, let alone wants to navigate their PC like it were one, using a mouse instead of a finger no less. In fact most do not! A phone is a phone and a PC is a PC and never the twain shall meet in many people’s minds. So any defaulting to phone behavior or navigation on a PC’s operating system is A Bad Thing! The kind of thing that only a tabletard would design.

HP TouchSmart tm2t

I know, as reviews go this review of the HP TouchSmart tm2t is pretty far behind the times. (I don’t even think Hewlett-Packard actually sells the TouchSmart tm2t anymore.) But I’ve been using one of these little buggers at work now for 6 months (actually, two of them by this point), and I’ve definitely formed some opinions.

First off, the concept: The HP TouchSmart is a laptop, notebook, whatever you want to call it. Except it has one very important twist, the monitor can be rotated to switch it into a tablet form factor. Sort of. As obviously the little multitasking gizmo is going to be thicker than an actual tablet-by-design because it puts casing fully around the display and around the laptop case, and because it has a keyboard and touchpad-mouse. These things take up space and add weight that a real tablet doesn’t have to bother with. And let me just say that in practice, it matters.

Not only is the HP TouchSmart tm2t thicker than a tablet because of its extra bits, but there’s a weird hump for the battery on the far edge of the case that extends the bottom out by quite a bit. This makes it rather awkward to hold, and to balance on anything that isn’t a very flat hard surface. So while it sits quite well on a desk or a table, it is definitely not a pleasure to hold, and it tends to topple over on your lap. Especially if you want to actually touch the touchscreen, which rather is half the point of the HP TouchSmart tm2t. Hence the name and all.

And here’s where my usage of it comes in. At work I’m developing some touchscreen-based software. So a laptop to bring to meetings, that can be converted into a tablet form factor for doing testing on, is a very handy concept. That’s why the company ordered the first one, for me to prototype the software with.

Let me just say that the second one the company ordered was against my recommendation.

Here’s why:

It’s a twitchy flaky little son of a laptop.

While the touchscreen does indeed perform multitouch, and in its own right do so fairly well, that’s only when the touchscreen actually works. Which is most of the time … but not all of the time. No, every so often the touchscreen goes into La La Land and ignores you completely for a handful of seconds. During which time you could beat on it and it’d do absolutely nothing. Frankly, I don’t know if this is a hardware issue or some kind of sleep state built into the drivers or what, but whatever the culprit is, it’s annoying.

That aside, how is the touchscreen itself? Meh. It’s okay. No more, no less. Certainly I’ve used worse. But frankly, I’ve also used much much better. The accuracy is only so-so, as is the responsiveness. It’s enough to generally work, but if you’ve ever had the pleasure of a well-designed touchscreen you’ll find using it quite … frustrating.

Now, the touchscreen also has a pen input, and the HP TouchSmart tm2t does come with a stylus. Actually, here’s one of the really annoying things about the HP TouchSmart tm2t – the lanyard holding the stylus. This thin but stiff string just sticks out of the side. It catches on everything. It gets in the way all the time. It’s a real pain in the asterisk and obviously an afterthought at best. You’ll be very tempted to just remove it. (Which I’ve done.) But the stylus pen bay does not hold that pen in very solidly. In fact, even though it has a click-lock-eject type mechanism to keep the stylus docked when you don’t need it, and to make it easy to grab when you do, the stylus in fact is exposed on the bottom and can easily catch on things. And presumably by design, while it kind-of locks in place, it’s not a very firm hold and will let you yank it right out. Meaning that should you remove the lanyard from your HP TouchSmart tm2t, you’re probably going to lose that stylus at some point.

Which, frankly, is no loss.

Okay, so yes, the HP TouchSmart tm2t does become much more responsive and accurate when you use a stylus instead of a finger. In fact it’s practically psychic in that you can hold the stylus a good distance from the touchscreen. You really don’t need to “touch” the screen with the stylus at all. And the right-click feature of the stylus is a lot faster than holding your finger in place for a few seconds while Windows decides that you’re right-clicking instead of left-clicking. So you’d think the stylus would be all sunshine and lollipops compared to actual touching with a finger.

Except the stylus is utter crap. It’s cheap. It feels flimsy. And honestly, who wants to whip out a pen every time they try to use the touchscreen? Maybe on a little phone or PDA with a tiny screen size and ham-hands, but not on this 12.1 inch screen. HP really flubbed on this one. With such a nice artistic case with an etched design on the HP TouchSmart tm2t, you’d think that HP had paid attention to detail. But once you pull out the stylus you’ll be convinced that in fact they cut some serious corners.

And while we’re on bad designs of the touchscreen, let’s talk about the rotate-to-tablet feature itself. This is essentially the lynchpin of the hardware design, that with a twist you can convert the HP TouchSmart tm2t from a notebook into a tablet. And ignoring the not-very-solid feel of this mechanic itself (because even though it doesn’t feel very secure, it has yet to actually break, so maybe it is engineer more solidly than it gives the impression of), the software lets you down here. Because when you rotate your screen 180 degrees, you’d expect that it automatically detects this and rotates it in Windows so that you’re not suddenly using an upside-down screen. It fails badly here. Maybe half of the time (at best) it actually does detect this and do it for you. The rest of the time, it does detect it, goes into thinking-about-rotate-mode, but then fails to rotate the screen. And if you ever update the drivers, this failure rate goes into 100% failure, where it never rotates the screen for you. So make sure to put your graphics driver controls in a handy place, because you’re going to have to rotate the screen manually a lot.

Of course using the touchscreen isn’t the HP TouchSmart tm2t’s only source of flaky performance. The touchpad (that little mouse replacement device) is just as bad. It quite often just completely ignores your attempts to left-click by tapping the pad component itself. So if you don’t want to drive yourself crazy, you’ll have to go back in time to when you actually had to use the left and right buttons. Which means stretching your thumb down while you navigate with your finger. Which might be fine for some folks, but honestly induced cramps in my less-than-stretchy hand. And let’s face it, is a huge step backwards in notebook usability.

So basically, if you have an HP TouchSmart tm2t, in spite of it having a touchpad and being designed around a rotatable touch screen, if you use it regularly you might as well get yourself a freaking mouse for all of the flubs in HP’s hardware. It’s that bad. And it completely defeats the purpose of the device, which is to be finger-friendly. What is the point of a TouchSmart that you don’t want to touch?

Of course it has other nuisances as well. The HP-installed software meant to enhance your computing experience I found to be rather annoying, gimmicky, and quickly went to remove. And I do mean all of it. From their TouchSmart software, to their support assistant nagware (Is HP not aware that Windows 7 already nags you enough about these things?), there wasn’t a thing that HP added that I found actually helped me in any way. Maybe some computing novices or young artistic types might find some of it useful or entertaining, but as a professional user, I found it all cumbersome and anti-productive. What’s even worse, even after trying to disable it, I found some of it would still revive itself at inconvenient times. Which necessitated complete removal.

Which was a Bad Thing.

For example, the webcam seemed to only be usable through the TouchSmart interface. No standard Windows drivers? Say what? Yeah. HP’s software development is just that bad.

Which should come as no surprise really, as what company could possibly buy WebOS from Palm and then completely fail to make it marketable in the phone/tablet market by keeping it so out of date / out of touch with reality?

HP + software development = Bad Things.

And honestly, I’ve yet to own and/or use an HP laptop of any kind from any era that has ever won me over. They seem to always be cutting corners somewhere, or just flat out failing to impress. At least with Dell you have a 50/50 shot of it being a good device. But HP is a 0% win in my experience. Maybe I’ve just had bad luck, but I doubt it. One such laptop years back had the hard drive fail so many times that I was getting to a first-name basis with the folks they hired in India to do support. And amazingly, once I swapped that HD out for one of my own purchasing, miraculously the crashes and failures stopped. HP has always cut corners, and likely will always cut corners, in my opinion. I don’t trust their hardware as far as I can throw it and almost never recommend it in any professional setting unless I’m really up against a wall.

And frankly, in this, the HP TouchSmart tm2t is very much a Hewlett-Packard product. It fails in everything it was meant to be good at. Because of its flaky touchpad and poor ergonomics It fails as a notebook. Because of its flaky touch screen and poor ergonomics it fails as a tablet. It feels cheap. The stylus is shoddy and a pleasure to loose once you remove the annoying lanyard tethering it in place. The software components let you down. The drivers/firmware are lacking. The speakers produce weak sound of poor quality. The cooling fans spin up to annoying sound levels at minimal provocation. And basically, the HP TouchSmart tm2t is a product to avoid when at all possible.

And if you think maybe I just got a faulty product, let me remind you again that I’ve been using two of them now, the second definitely of a later production than the first, and in their faults they are really quite consistent. So these failures are not accidental things in manufacturing, but by design and across the product line.

HP could have done better.

A blind chipmunk could have done better.

The only really positive things to say about the HP TouchSmart tm2t are that the keyboard felt nice, and that the cover design was artistic.

In that the HP TouchSmart tm2t at least generally worked, I give it a score of 2 flaky touch devices out of five. If you can find any other hybrid notebook/tablet PC to meet your needs, by all means go with that instead.

The more I use Windows 7 at work and at home, the less I hate it. I have to give Microsoft credit, after royally flirking up Windows Vista, they came back strong with a real alternative that works out well for most people. Of course due to resource usage issues, Windows 7 still isn’t a suitable replacement for Windows XP in all cases, but for new PCs there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give Windows 7 a shot.

But if there’s one thing that really sets Microsoft Windows apart from Linux, it’s that they get the little things right. It’s not just about making an OS that works (because that should go without saying), but about making an OS that’s smooth. It’s something that while Linux has gotten better at, is still very much in the win column for Microsoft. (Since this is about PCs, I’m not going to bring up the Apple Macintosh, even if these days it is a PC itself, and running a beautified Unix OS no less.)

One feature of Windows 7 that I am wishing I could enjoy more is “pinning”. The concept itself could be a handy time saver. The stupid Start Menu for example, the one that theoretically holds all of your commonly-used applications so that you don’t have to keep hitting “All Programs” to find what you want to run, I could see where in theory that just might work for someone. If it could be populated with shortcuts to the applications that you actually want to use regularly. I don’t know what “logic” fills it, but I use the term “logic” loosely there, as it never seems to grasp what I actually use frequently.

Same for the Windows Explorer shortcut pinned to the taskbar. You can right-click on the shortcut to access a list of frequently used directories. In theory. But, again, the “logic” that fills it somehow completely fails to find what I actually use regularly.  Even though I always browse straight to it!

I don’t know how Microsoft can fail to not recognize what I’m doing, but somehow Windows is oblivious to my actual intent.

Silly Windows.

Which turns an otherwise potentially useful feature into a nuisance instead.

Now, theoretically, there’s a fix for this. In theory you can “pin” the shortcuts that you want into permanent residence at the top of the heap.

In theory.

In practice however, to my knowledge, this can only be done by right-clicking on an item already where you want it to be, and then choosing to pin it there permanently. So in other words, if the bad logic that propagates the lists doesn’t comprehend what you want to shortcut in the first place (and for me it almost never does) then you have no mechanism to use to pin it there to overcome its bad logic.  Which is something like circular logic down the drain.

And it’s really annoying, because nowhere else in the Windows user interface is the option to pin.  Nowhere can you tell it what you want.

You can’t just find the shortcut that you want in the “All Programs” Start Menu and pin that. You can’t just browse to the folder you use all the time in Windows Explorer and pin that. Because that would be easy (for the user) and make sense.

You can’t even manually find some “favorites” list of shortcuts somewhere in your user data and force what you want in there like an advanced user would try to do. Or hack the registry to add your folders to the permanent “pinned” list in Windows Explorer like an extremely advanced user would try to do. For better or worse, that’s not even a way to go about getting around Microsoft’s bad logic.

Frankly, I’m not sure what the solution is to pinning what you want when Windows is too stupid to find it. I don’t know how you can manually open a folder in Windows Explorer on a nearly daily basis and yet not have it show up in your Frequent list, but there you have it.

If you know of a solution though, please, by all means share it with us!

Obviously, I want a smartphone that can run an x86-based architecture. It’s not that I have anything against ARM, per se, just that I want to be able to run some actual software. No more apps! It’s about time we bring applications to the smartphone.

I want a real version of Microsoft Windows. Not Microsoft’s stupid upcoming port of Windows 8 to ARM. Blech! No, I want a real version of Windows. Not because I love Microsoft. Or Windows. It’s about application compatibility really. Such is life. Ideally, I’d love to be able to dual-boot my real x86 smartphone between some version of Linux and good old Windows when I need it. (Or maybe since I won’t likely be gaming on it, I’ll just VMware my Windows from Linux for a single-boot virtualized solution.)

I want a noise-canceling microphone system so that people can still hear me even if the wind blows gently by.

And the ability to switch to speakerphone, of course.

In fact, you know, I want to reiterate this here, I want it to be usable as a dratted phone! Seriously! It’s a phone! Make it one! Let’s make the calling quality of this thing actually usable, eh? All of these freaking phones that barely can even work as a phone is just ludicrous. It should be a phone first and everything else second. Call quality is the priority!

I want real on-device storage. A simple SSD hard drive solution is peachy keen with me. Maybe an SD card slot or two. Even microSD. Whatever. NO CLOUD! Really. None. I have no desire whatsoever to run everything through some slow 3G/4G network. Nor to pay an arm and a leg (or suffer penalizing slowdowns from my provider) for my allegedly “unlimited” data plan, just so that I can route everything through some nebulous “cloud” instead of storing it on my local device where I wanted it in the first place anyway, taking up tons of bandwidth and wasting my time with this slow procedure. Seriously people, until cellular network providers get with the 21st century, providing truly unlimited, unfettered, and unmolested data plans at reasonable rates, not to mention true 4G, “the cloud” is pretty much the worst idea ever. EVER! (Did you hear that Apple?)

I want two audio jacks. Not just a headphone jack, but also a microphone jack! So that I can plug in any old headset. I mean honestly, how hard can that be?

I want some kind of hybrid HMDI / DVI / VGA port or dongle so that I can plug in anywhere I need when I want a big screen or projector device.

I want at least one USB port, preferably two.

I want radio madness. Cellphone, obviously. 4G, of course. Wi-Fi, no doubt. GPS, for sure. Bluetooth, a given, v4.0 (or later depending on when this actually happens) would be nice. And while we’re at it, why not up the ante with any or all of the following: Wireless USB, Wireless HDMI (or some such HD-capable wireless stream), FM radio, digital FM radio, or even digital TV. Let’s see just how many antennas we can fit into a single device and have them all still work. And, to save power, each can be turned off individually of course!

I want the touchscreen to be multitouch and to be very responsive. These days both should go without saying, but sadly…

Haptic … but only if it works right. (On my Viliv S5 for example, haptic will vibrate as if you pressed the screen even though the screen may not actually have registered the press. I don’t know how this is possible, but it happens so often and provides so many false positives on feedback that I just had to turn it off.)

A slide-down hardware keyboard. Not the stupid netbook-style, but the simple slide down type you’d expect on a smartphone. Don’t be fancy. Keep it simple.  Maybe add a trackball with left and right mouse click buttons.  Maybe. Or even the option to add a keyboard to the back of the device. Let it plug in somehow to convert the phone into a netbook-ish-thingy. Not ideal, but still better than a touchscreen software keyboard.

These new dock-into-a-laptop-like-thing phones are also a neat concept. Or at least would be for an actual Windows-running x86-based smartphone. Then your phone really could be a laptop! Maybe it could even include things like an optical drive, an additional hard drive, extra USB ports, a long-life battery for serious usage as a computer, etc. Even the multifunction HDMI / DVI / VGA could be supported through the dock where the smartphone natively has mini HDMI, but through the laptop dock provides DVI+VGA as well.

I want a widescreen display with a MINIMUM of a 768 vertical resolution AT ALL TIMES! No matter how I rotate the phone, even when horizontal widescreen, I still want at least 768 vertical pixels. 800 would be just fine. But 600 or less, which is all too common unfortunately, just isn’t enough for some applications. Although … with Windows 8 having two visual models, one oriented towards phones / tablets and one for good old computers, perhaps docking the phone could be done in such a way as to make the phone-based user interface visible on the phone while the computer-based user interface shows up on the dock’s screen. I wonder if Windows 8 will be able to do both simultaneously…

And you know what, here I’m sure I deviate from the norm a bit, but I’d actually be just fine with a 5 inch screen form-factor, so long as there was minimal framing around the screen. I really honestly prefer my phone to not be the size of a gnat. I like being able to read what’s on the screen without zooming in all of the time.  Or squinting so much. But at the end of the day, it’s still a phone, so even if I’ll no doubt get a holder for my belt, it should still be able to fit into my pocket. (Considering that I can just barely fit my Viliv S5 into most of my pockets, a little trimmed down from that form factor would be fine.) So no bigger than that, but as big as that would be peachy. Not necessary, but welcome all the same.