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Enthusiast Hacks WiFi Into Treo 650
Sammy at PalmAddict writes "Shadowmite, a Palm enthusiast has managed to hack his Palm One Treo 650 smartphone, enabling it to work with the Palm One WiFi card, despite Palm admitting the Treo was never designed to use WiFi technology. Shadowmite managed to get his hands on the Pa1m One WiFi card and modify it so that his Treo 650 could use it. The experiment was a success, and is causing quite a stir -- putting pressure on Palm One to provide support and fully support the new drivers."
Pressed to your ear, this would be the most innocent looking wireless sniffer yet (if someone can get it to run as one).
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
Why buy subsidized crap phones?
In Finland carriers can't subsidize phones, as by law it's illegal to tie the phone and the subscription. If you offer a phone, the price and terms of sale must be same with or without subscription to any service, so you can't tie the two.
So phone manufacturers sell their phones. More features = more sales. They don't have to bend over for the carriers - they are not their customers. So if carrier would prefer that the phone doesn't have WiFi... well, tough, they don't have a say in it.
And we have pretty damn cheap airtime, as the only way carriers can compete for customers is by offering a good cheap product - they can't just toss a cooler phone free, tied to some stupid package that appears cheap, but ties you to one operator for x months (or years).
Sure, phones cost money. Shocker. Feature rich phones cost a lot of money. Double shocker. At the same time your phonebill isn't used to subsidize someone elses shiny new phone used to lure him to the crappy service that you are stuck with.