want to play with/do hacks,roots,roms on another os, iphone? symbian? maemo?

oops I meant to put this in android lounge.

I love geeking out on stuff, rooting, toying with and flashing experimental things. been trying different roms and such on my inspire. I've flashed experimental code onto routers, waps, mp3 players and cars and more, but android phones are the coolest.

I think I've seen most of what android has to offer and I like it a lot I just want to see what something else is like. Flashing some random cyanogen-based or sense-based rom that's been customized with ugly colors fonts and stuff by some random xda poster with a name like xXxTweakerX420xXx doesn't really have any appeal to me. I like cyanogenmod perfectly fine and if I wanted to make it ugly I could do it myself. (sense doesn't need any help lol)

My 1st smartphone was a nokia 6682 with some old version of symbian. I didn't really like that compared to winmo std/smartphone that I began using later. I understand some newer versions of symbian are way different.

We started using winmo standard/smartphone phones at work years back, stuff like blackjacks, moto Qs, blackjack IIs. So a really old symbian and winmo is all I know besides android. (I liked winmo std so much I wanted to see what winmo pro was like so I adopted an unused htc wizard for a couple weeks, hated that.)

My brother just got a iphone 4S and I could probably get his old 3GS pretty cheap. Could I have any fun jailbreaking that and doing stuff? Or would I be past the point of being able to be impressed by anything I could do on a jb iphone?

I know nothing at all of maemo but those big nokia n800 n900 things look pretty cool, maybe a bit expensive though.

Newer symbian? what's that like?

Basically, what's something that could be fun and cheap for a big android geek who's not at all impressed by anything a normal iphone could do?

 

I started hating coding a long time ago, about the best I can do these days without wanting to shoot myself would be a page or 2 long batch file or shell script. I wouldn't want to code android apps, I know what can be done, I'm fairly confident I could pick it up on a basic level but I know someone else out there could my app better/faster than me and probably already has. I'll just use theirs. But the Arduino thing looks exactly like something that could re-up my interest. Writing pages and pages of code that in the end, ultimately results in some re-arranged pixels on a screen or re-arranged written bits to a hard drive is too tedious for me. Coding a "tasker" like app for my house with microcontrollers all over, that would be awesome! If kitchen lights=off then power off pool pump. If garage door=up then power on disco ball!

Unfortunately though for the next ...while, I don't know how long, I'll never be in the same spot long enough to get into something like that. Not a lot of time at home and work, though I do have lots of downtime, for now it's a whole lot of driving and sitting at different offices. Need a workbench tools and soldering iron. But yeah microcontrollers connected to everything with power in my house that I can control from my ssh sounds awesome, someday.