I’ve been using my old Nexus One (running Android 2.3) for the past week, while a replacement Nexus 5X has been in transit. Observations:

• I forgot how bad the screen was. Basically invisible in bright sunlight, even at full brightness and shaded.
• How do I communicate? Talk is dying, Allo and Hangouts aren't supported. Using an old enough apk of Hangouts that can be installed gives a modal "please upgrade" popup on start.
• The browser isn't horrible, but there's apparently some cross-site SSL feature it doesn't support, because I get warnings about buttflare certs being bad pretty much everywhere.
• Twitter works! Crazy!
• Maps works too!
• Signal supposedly supports 2.3 but I got strange errors every time I tried to install it.
• I forgot how slow HSPA was.
• Gmail works, but for some reason it doesn't seem to sync quite right. I very rarely can see the emails in my Inbox, even when Gmail says they're there. Inbox isn't supported, sadly. The browser-based Gmail is better, but no notifications obviously. Some HTML glitches too, but nothing horrible.
• It's seems like a bad thing that an OS released a little more than SIX years ago would be so unsupported. The Gmail/Hangouts/Signal/Allo situation is sad. To be fair, though, Ice Cream Sandwich (8 months newer) was a big departure and it seems like a lot of apps use that as their oldest supported version.
• The vibrate is INTENSE.
• The ringtones are horrible. The alarm tones are worse.
• The camera isn't actually so bad, but the 80db shutter sound is surprising every time.
• I miss the trackball (especially trackball notifications).
• Having to unlock to see/swipe notifications is surprisingly painful.
• The calendar widget only shows your next event, not your agenda for the day. How is that useful?
• I actually don't hate the small form factor as much as I thought I would

I have more than 40GB of music I’ve ripped from my own CDs, purchased from a variety of locations (eMusic, Amazon, iTunes, some musicians' own websites) and in a few cases, yes, pirated. I listen to music at work, at home, in my car, and while running, and it’d be really nice to be able to take advantages of these new recently-announced cloud services (Google, Amazon, Apple) to store and access my music from anywhere. But no company is forever. IBM and HP are shells of once-invulnerable corporations. Microsoft no longer innovates – they follow. None of these companies (as large as they are right now) will necessarily be around in twenty years, and there’s no guarantee that any of their services will be around in even five.

I’ve got a limited connection, which means uploading music to Amazon or Google would take something like a week. And my Android phone and Linux work computer will almost certainly not cooperate with Apple. So what’s a guy to do? For now, I plan on continuing to do things the old fashioned way. I’m not sure what kind of cloud service would make me feel comfortable spending the time uploading all of my music, but so far, it’s not any of these.

I now have one new gmail invitation available. If you want it, or know someone who knows someone who wants one still, first come, first served.