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Motorola Hacker Rewards Program
Nuclear Elephant writes "Pen Computing Magazine recently ran an article about the Motorola v710, which has been crippled by Verizon. A hacking contest is now underway, and the pot is steadily growing. The first hacker to provide a hack (or instructions) to enable OBEX and OPP features on the handset before Jan 1 wins the pot. See the official site for more information." We mentioned this phone a few days ago.
Am I missing something? Why not just switch to a different network that isn't so hostile towards their customers. I mean, the fact that Verizon is actually saying that they don't offer a bluetooth phone because it doesn't fit their business model, despite the fact that many customers want it is ridiculous. Sounds like a path towards an out-of-business model to me.
...then they should be smart enough not to waste their time and effort buying a crippled Moto V710 in the first place, or otherwise contributing to having more people buy the phones and becoming satisfied customers via a hack.
Who would a hack serve? Those who will continue to support bad business practices and companies.
For a comparable price one can find comparable "unlocked" GSM phones that have the original manufacturer's firmware, have all features enabled, and allow one to get service from any mobile company one chooses, often world-wide with the now commonplace GSM world phones.
I have to agree that Verizon is making the phones useless. Next phone I get is going to be voice only. I wasted a bunch of money buying a couple of Motorola 722's to then find out that I had to pay more to use every feature.
I wanted to sync my calendar/address book with Yahoo. I called Verizon, no program exists for syncing Yahoo to a Motorola 722. So I said fine I'll write one and open source it. When I mentioned this on the Qualcomm forms I almost got lynched. People complained about commies like me ruining their ability to make money and support their families. I said that I was willing to buy the program but none exists -- no one offered to write it.
Qualcom is completely against free distibution of apps for Brew. They told me that I could write it and distribute for free on the Verizon net if I was willing to pay the fees for all of the users. I also had to pay a $4000 up front fee. Turns out that they require additional app royalty fees to use the OS I just bought from them.
The offical reason for this "fee" is that Qualcomm will audit my apps to ensure that they don't contain a virus that would call 911. I tried to point out to them that a virus on home computers with modems is just as dangerous, but they wouldn't listen.
None of this is Motorola's fault. It is all Qualcomm and Verizon.
When my contract is up I'm getting a new network and Linux based phones.