An irreplaceable battery is simply a horrible design decision, and very poor engineering. Any other company, and people would be screaming to the sky at how shitty a job they've done. But since it's apple, they get a pass from all the people who worship the company.
I was faced with the same problem a few years ago, and decided to move all of my documents to electronic filing.
I moved everything to Scansoft's Paperport system.
When I get bills in the mail, I load them into my scanner (new model has an automatic document feeder), and scan them into Paperport. Then it's just a matter of dropping them in the proper folders for filing.
The originals go through my confetti-shredder before going into the trash.
The electronic versions are backed-up nightly to a seperate drive in the system, and archived on CD-R every few months. I've got documents (credit card statements, bank statements, paystubs, tax forms, insurance, car maintenance, store receipts, etc) dating back to 1999 stored on the system, and I can pull any of them up in seconds.
The initial setup took me a full day of scanning to empty out my big acordion-folder of papers, but it's been clear-sailing ever since.
I'd like to see some basis for your assumption that a company owning the copyright to something prevents people from buying or importing from another country.
Keep in mind that these are not knockoffs or illegal versions, they are 100% legit for their country of origin.
The companies have no right whatsoever to restrict buyers from purchasing foreign versions, or selling those foreign versions in North America. Sending out a C&D is just legalspeak to frighten people off.
The webmaster of that site should've stuck to his guns. At the very least, it would've brought Miramax a LOT of bad press, which is exactly what companies fear the most.
Miramax has already alienated plenty of people with their "put big red dots on movie screens to help 'prevent' movie pirates". In reality, all it does is annoy customers that paid up to $15 to see their movie in a real theatre...
Maybe it's time to rethink actually paying to see Miramax films...
Hmm... Speaking of that, how about a virtual display proggy of the shareware type that are available?
Just let the ads display on "Screen 0" or whatever, and use "Screen 1" for everything you wanna do. If you turned the speakers down, you'd probably never even notice the ads.
If the Levy goes through (and I have every belief that it will because non of our politicians are smart enough to understand that the CPCC is pulling one over on the entire Canadian public) and taxes MP3 players, harddrives, DVDs and every other media format these assholes can get their hands on to generate a buck...
I WILL BUY ALL MY MEDIA AND HARDWARE FROM THE U.S.A.
I refuse to give the bastards a cent, so I'll buy it from the US and bring it across. Imports from the US are NOT subject to the Levy (it's a reseller Levy), so you're free and clear if you mailorder or drive across and pick them up (you still need to pay regular tax however).
Of course, the possibility exists that they'll find a way to levy imports at some time in the future, at which point Canadian retailers will lose a ton of business to goods shipped in illegally from the US or overseas.
Retailers will have to pay the price for the government's foolishness.
If I were the author, I'd be a little wary of calling it "Warflying". US authorities are mighty uptight already, and would probably send out investigators to make his life miserable faster than cops arresting students for using PHP in the privacy of their dorms...
That said, I found some WAPs in my condo that I can connect to from my livingroom. I'm as-yet undecided if I want to siphon some bandwidth from them.
Regardless, when I go to visit my parent's place over the holidays, I'm making sure my dad's WAP router is secured.
Don't know where you heard that. The daughter of one of my coworkers had her ATM card info stolen last summer and her account emptied of $1,000.
She still had the original ATM card in her purse, and never gave anyone her PIN number. It was either stolen through an ATM scam (as in this article), or by someone copying her card with a portable reader when she paid using Interac at a store.
Yet thieves still emptied her account. The bank wouldn't do crap, and she's still out the grand today.
Credit cards are protected, many banks refuse to protect transactions on ATM cards.
Use an ATM in Vegas sometime. The ones inside the casinos charge a percentage on money withdrawn, rather than a flat rate. So on $100, they'll charge you 4% (or whatever), on $200 8% and so on.
Step outside the casino and ATMs are the regular ones that charge a couple bucks for a "foreign" transfer.
Still, it's a scam. I take out a big chunk of money ($100 at a time) to minimize their money gouging.
If you get the chance, check out Dave Haynie's "Deathbed Vigil" tape. As you probably know, Dave was one of the key architects of the Amiga hardware platform and designed many of the systems that we still know and love.
The "Deathbed Vigil" tape is a video that he made inside Commodore on one of the last days before the collapse. It's pretty depressing though - massive assembly and warehouse areas all totally cleaned out and shut down. It does run into a lot of well-known names inside the Commodore R&D offices and such, as well as at the final staff party and such.
And there's the famous (and well-deserved) burning in effigy of the CEO and accomplices...
As I said, it's worth a look, but it's kind of depressing. They had a lot of very talented people in hardware and software and a few suits who wanted to line their own pockets screwed it all away...
Hey, at least I got Dave's business card with the videotape, and I still have an A1200 in my bedroom (although it hasn't been fired up for quite a while).
I have a dual-format burner and have tested both -R and +R format discs in a variety of set-top and computer DVD drives.
The +R disc didn't play in any of the set-top players I own (ranging from 1-4 years old).
The -R played in 3 of the 4 initially, and 4 of 4 once the last machine had a firmware update.
The results were a little better in DVD-ROM drives, but -R still has a sizeable edge. Naturally this will change with newer players, but if you need compatibility with older players, then -R is definately the way to go.
That said, I do a lot of professional, and industrial DVD authoring, and I need to have the best compatibility (aside from authoring-mode blanks) for stuff I send to clients to preview.
You have some valid points, but the fact also is that north american "broadband" providers are perfectly happy extracting maximum dollar for minimum value.
So long as people can "check email and surf the web", they figure they have all the bases covered. There's simply no will to provide the bandwidth for video on demand, or other technologies that would require fast networks.
And when there finally IS the demand, they'll have to spend millions retooling their networks for more performance yet again, and we'll hear more moaning and whining about the cost of implementation. At least some of the asian broadband providers are "getting it". If you have the technology to provide service at the 10Mb/sec or 100Mb/sec level, then roll it out - even if you're going to cap it at lower levels, it will cost less down the road when you need to utilize it.
I'm curious if Nokia would be angry that they'd lose sales for their own games from people that would prefer to just use "free" MAME games instead. Are they selling the hardware at a loss hoping that game sales will make up the difference.
I need to publish a quick correction here - The industry body I should've been referring to was not SOCAN, but the CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective).
As far as I'm aware, SOCAN does distribute royalties collected from broadcast and licensing rights to the proper artists.
NONE of the money collected from the CD-R levy has been distributed. Sure, SOCAN distributes money they've collected from radio stations and such, but not a cent from the CD-R slush-fund has been given out.
I would have NO PROBLEM AT ALL if royalties for music went DIRECTLY to the artist involved, and not through the record label, managers, agents, etc.
Whatcha wanna bet that SOCAN would drop the idea in a split-second if they were unable to fill their own pockets with cash.
Quite a wonderful scam they have going here:
-Private Organization, doesn't have to release their books, profit information, membership list, etc. -Never has given out ANY of the MILLIONS of dollars they've collected in the "name of the artists". -No public accountability. -Their income is enforced by the Canadian Government by way of levies - guaranteed cash flow!
If only every business could be so lucky.
It's time for the Government to dissolve the levies on this sad, sad excuse for ripping off Canadian consumers.
I had purchased an unlocked 8290 (brand new) over the net. Great little phone, I really liked it, but the problem was that some brain-surgeon at Nokia had decided that to "assist" operators, the phone would auto-lock itself to the first SIM that was inserted into it.
Never mind that when you buy the phone it was unlocked and would accept any carrier's SIM, but afterwards it locked and you were stuck.
Needless to say, I was mad. Phoned Nokia, who said "We can't generate an unlock code for the phone, call your provider". Called the provider "We don't carry that model, so we can't generate a code.". Argh. Of course it was especially annoying that obviously Nokia COULD help me, but they chose not to. Soured me on Nokia phones something fierce.
In the end, buying a $10 cable and using a free utility off the 'net unlocked the phone in about 2 seconds. Still, it was a problem that never should've happened.
That said, I'm on a Sony Ericsson P800 now and I love it - triband, totally unlocked, all of the goodies. I'm skipping the P900 for now (as it's just an incremental upgrade), but will probably pick up the next phone/PDA offering from SE (hopefully some-time in the summer/fall of next year).
They might enjoy the right to privacy if they can convince the courts that the prices in their store are classified national secrets or something, but I'm afraid that price information for a "big sale" doesn't quite cut it. If some stockboy decides to release their prices, they don't have much of a leg to stand on.
On the other hand, the website in question (which was involved in this during the last go-round I believe), is probably enjoying the extra attention and big spike in viewers that comes from this sort of trouble.
What they should be doing is exactly the same thing that Google does when they get a takedown notice - post it in full, including the itemized list of everything that they're being requested to remove.
One of the interesting things here is the method by which the company chooses to "protect" their product. Security through obscurity it is, folks.
Rather than designing a somewhat more secure system to ensure that something like this doesn't happen (dedicated chip to encrypt photos with a key based on the camera's serial number or a randomly rotated key that is changed when the camera is brought back for prints to be made), it appears they've taken the alternative cost-saving measure of "using a nonstandard cable connection combined with their own image transfer software".
It's one of those interesting company dilemmas...
Do you:
a) Make an extremely difficult to hack camera that costs an extra $50 to produce with custom encryption chips, etc.
or
b) Create a cheaper camera with very basic methods of trying to prevent user downloads - cheap to produce, bad if hackers find out how to reverse engineer and load photos from. Then use some DMCA action to go after those who have hacked the flimsy protection on the camera.
Obviously "A" is safer in the longrun, but costs more capital upfront. Much more difficult to fund a pilot project which would have high initial startup costs to develop more secure technology.
Option "B" costs less upfront, but once the transfer software/methods have been made available on the net, the cat's out of the bag and there's no shoving the kitty back in again, no matter how much DMCA is utilized. The only other possibility is changing their business-plan. And that's what I bet is going to happen.
If I was a betting man, I'd say that knew that this would happen eventually, and hoped to hook enough consumers that when they had to get people to purchase the camera upfront, or put a deposit down, they'd already be sold on this style of photography.
There isn't much to these cameras however, so it could be argued that they didn't bother with heavy-duty anti-hacking protection because they'll be obsolete in a year and will be replaced with a better model. I can't see the cameras costing more than about $30-40 a piece to make mass-produced (and probably quite a bit less in volume), they're little more than glorified webcams. As such, a half dozen sets of prints would pay for the units - anything ontop of that is gravy.
In the meantime, the company will probably be developing version 2 with a better imager, better lens, and better protection against hardware hacking.
I think the camera idea here is a far better business plan than the late, unlamented cue-cat. If they simply implemented a "one camera per customer" database tracked by driver's license number or SIN, they'd minimize the damage enough that people who want to use the camera for legit purposes would probably still cover the cost of the cameras by people who wanted to download their own pictures.
The other (more realistic) option would be to have people buy the camera for $40, and receive 4 dozen free prints from it as part of the package, or to have people put down $40 as a deposit, and get it back when the camera is returned for processing.
Yup, sneaking DRM in the back door a tiny little bit at a time is the only way to get stuff like this implemented.
Sadly, for the majority of uninformed consumers out there, it will work.
Here's waiting for a "Max Headroom" styled future with big networks that control your TV to the point where you can't even turn them off (or face fines/prison time for interfering with a broadcast).
Who knows, maybe the CRTC will make a good decision for once, and refuse to follow the lead of the FCC and will not mandate that Canadian sets will require the digital restrictions chips be implemented - or will allow them to be turned-off if desired.
It never ceases to amaze me how "suits don't get it". There is a HUGE trade on the net in old "classic" TV shows (depending on your point of view), everything from "Greatest American Hero", to "A-Team", to (as mentioned before) "Max Headroom". Regardless if you happen to like these particular series, people ARE downloading and watching them. If the companies involved were to make a subscription service available to watch old shows (complete with episode synopsis, cast/crew lists, etc), people would pay...
But of course it's a change from the "old fashioned way of doing things", and that scares the hell out of them.
It may very well be that installing cracked n-gage games on other phones will be easier than performing the complex battery/compartment door/tinylittle memorycard operation involved in installing the real n-gage game modules inside the phone...
Text messaging in other parts of the world is far more popular than voice calls. In some countries because it's free, or nearly free. Instead of paying $0.20/min, you just tap out a text message for free, or for $0.02
In some ways, I'd prefer it to getting some of the rambling voicemessages I seem to get. Rather than getting 2 minutes of someone blathering on, send me a couple lines of text message that are clear and concise.
Slashdot Mirror
An irreplaceable battery is simply a horrible design decision, and very poor engineering. Any other company, and people would be screaming to the sky at how shitty a job they've done. But since it's apple, they get a pass from all the people who worship the company.
Well said!
I was faced with the same problem a few years ago, and decided to move all of my documents to electronic filing.
I moved everything to Scansoft's Paperport system.
When I get bills in the mail, I load them into my scanner (new model has an automatic document feeder), and scan them into Paperport. Then it's just a matter of dropping them in the proper folders for filing.
The originals go through my confetti-shredder before going into the trash.
The electronic versions are backed-up nightly to a seperate drive in the system, and archived on CD-R every few months. I've got documents (credit card statements, bank statements, paystubs, tax forms, insurance, car maintenance, store receipts, etc) dating back to 1999 stored on the system, and I can pull any of them up in seconds.
The initial setup took me a full day of scanning to empty out my big acordion-folder of papers, but it's been clear-sailing ever since.
Highly recommended.
Ah, okay, my mistake - being a Canuck though, I don't think we're covered under US laws north of the border :)
N.
I'd like to see some basis for your assumption that a company owning the copyright to something prevents people from buying or importing from another country.
Keep in mind that these are not knockoffs or illegal versions, they are 100% legit for their country of origin.
The companies have no right whatsoever to restrict buyers from purchasing foreign versions, or selling those foreign versions in North America. Sending out a C&D is just legalspeak to frighten people off.
The webmaster of that site should've stuck to his guns. At the very least, it would've brought Miramax a LOT of bad press, which is exactly what companies fear the most.
Miramax has already alienated plenty of people with their "put big red dots on movie screens to help 'prevent' movie pirates". In reality, all it does is annoy customers that paid up to $15 to see their movie in a real theatre...
Maybe it's time to rethink actually paying to see Miramax films...
Hmm... Speaking of that, how about a virtual display proggy of the shareware type that are available?
Just let the ads display on "Screen 0" or whatever, and use "Screen 1" for everything you wanna do. If you turned the speakers down, you'd probably never even notice the ads.
Possible?
N.
Well, I can guarantee this:
If the Levy goes through (and I have every belief that it will because non of our politicians are smart enough to understand that the CPCC is pulling one over on the entire Canadian public) and taxes MP3 players, harddrives, DVDs and every other media format these assholes can get their hands on to generate a buck...
I WILL BUY ALL MY MEDIA AND HARDWARE FROM THE U.S.A.
I refuse to give the bastards a cent, so I'll buy it from the US and bring it across. Imports from the US are NOT subject to the Levy (it's a reseller Levy), so you're free and clear if you mailorder or drive across and pick them up (you still need to pay regular tax however).
Of course, the possibility exists that they'll find a way to levy imports at some time in the future, at which point Canadian retailers will lose a ton of business to goods shipped in illegally from the US or overseas.
Retailers will have to pay the price for the government's foolishness.
If I were the author, I'd be a little wary of calling it "Warflying". US authorities are mighty uptight already, and would probably send out investigators to make his life miserable faster than cops arresting students for using PHP in the privacy of their dorms...
That said, I found some WAPs in my condo that I can connect to from my livingroom. I'm as-yet undecided if I want to siphon some bandwidth from them.
Regardless, when I go to visit my parent's place over the holidays, I'm making sure my dad's WAP router is secured.
N.
Don't know where you heard that. The daughter of one of my coworkers had her ATM card info stolen last summer and her account emptied of $1,000.
She still had the original ATM card in her purse, and never gave anyone her PIN number. It was either stolen through an ATM scam (as in this article), or by someone copying her card with a portable reader when she paid using Interac at a store.
Yet thieves still emptied her account. The bank wouldn't do crap, and she's still out the grand today.
Credit cards are protected, many banks refuse to protect transactions on ATM cards.
N.
Use an ATM in Vegas sometime. The ones inside the casinos charge a percentage on money withdrawn, rather than a flat rate. So on $100, they'll charge you 4% (or whatever), on $200 8% and so on.
Step outside the casino and ATMs are the regular ones that charge a couple bucks for a "foreign" transfer.
Still, it's a scam. I take out a big chunk of money ($100 at a time) to minimize their money gouging.
N.
If you get the chance, check out Dave Haynie's "Deathbed Vigil" tape. As you probably know, Dave was one of the key architects of the Amiga hardware platform and designed many of the systems that we still know and love.
The "Deathbed Vigil" tape is a video that he made inside Commodore on one of the last days before the collapse. It's pretty depressing though - massive assembly and warehouse areas all totally cleaned out and shut down. It does run into a lot of well-known names inside the Commodore R&D offices and such, as well as at the final staff party and such.
And there's the famous (and well-deserved) burning in effigy of the CEO and accomplices...
As I said, it's worth a look, but it's kind of depressing. They had a lot of very talented people in hardware and software and a few suits who wanted to line their own pockets screwed it all away...
Hey, at least I got Dave's business card with the videotape, and I still have an A1200 in my bedroom (although it hasn't been fired up for quite a while).
N.
I have a dual-format burner and have tested both -R and +R format discs in a variety of set-top and computer DVD drives.
The +R disc didn't play in any of the set-top players I own (ranging from 1-4 years old).
The -R played in 3 of the 4 initially, and 4 of 4 once the last machine had a firmware update.
The results were a little better in DVD-ROM drives, but -R still has a sizeable edge. Naturally this will change with newer players, but if you need compatibility with older players, then -R is definately the way to go.
That said, I do a lot of professional, and industrial DVD authoring, and I need to have the best compatibility (aside from authoring-mode blanks) for stuff I send to clients to preview.
You have some valid points, but the fact also is that north american "broadband" providers are perfectly happy extracting maximum dollar for minimum value.
So long as people can "check email and surf the web", they figure they have all the bases covered. There's simply no will to provide the bandwidth for video on demand, or other technologies that would require fast networks.
And when there finally IS the demand, they'll have to spend millions retooling their networks for more performance yet again, and we'll hear more moaning and whining about the cost of implementation. At least some of the asian broadband providers are "getting it". If you have the technology to provide service at the 10Mb/sec or 100Mb/sec level, then roll it out - even if you're going to cap it at lower levels, it will cost less down the road when you need to utilize it.
N.
I'm curious if Nokia would be angry that they'd lose sales for their own games from people that would prefer to just use "free" MAME games instead. Are they selling the hardware at a loss hoping that game sales will make up the difference.
N.
Whatcha talking about, Apple users have done this for years :)
I need to publish a quick correction here - The industry body I should've been referring to was not SOCAN, but the CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective).
As far as I'm aware, SOCAN does distribute royalties collected from broadcast and licensing rights to the proper artists.
And in the non-FUD category:
NONE of the money collected from the CD-R levy has been distributed. Sure, SOCAN distributes money they've collected from radio stations and such, but not a cent from the CD-R slush-fund has been given out.
And I WORK in the broadcast industry...
N.
ABSOLUTELY.
I would have NO PROBLEM AT ALL if royalties for music went DIRECTLY to the artist involved, and not through the record label, managers, agents, etc.
Whatcha wanna bet that SOCAN would drop the idea in a split-second if they were unable to fill their own pockets with cash.
Quite a wonderful scam they have going here:
-Private Organization, doesn't have to release their books, profit information, membership list, etc.
-Never has given out ANY of the MILLIONS of dollars they've collected in the "name of the artists".
-No public accountability.
-Their income is enforced by the Canadian Government by way of levies - guaranteed cash flow!
If only every business could be so lucky.
It's time for the Government to dissolve the levies on this sad, sad excuse for ripping off Canadian consumers.
It basically doubles them at current prices.
The levy is $0.20/CD. The price of blank CDs is in the $0.20 range.
N.
I had a fun one with Nokia:
I had purchased an unlocked 8290 (brand new) over the net. Great little phone, I really liked it, but the problem was that some brain-surgeon at Nokia had decided that to "assist" operators, the phone would auto-lock itself to the first SIM that was inserted into it.
Never mind that when you buy the phone it was unlocked and would accept any carrier's SIM, but afterwards it locked and you were stuck.
Needless to say, I was mad. Phoned Nokia, who said "We can't generate an unlock code for the phone, call your provider". Called the provider "We don't carry that model, so we can't generate a code.". Argh. Of course it was especially annoying that obviously Nokia COULD help me, but they chose not to. Soured me on Nokia phones something fierce.
In the end, buying a $10 cable and using a free utility off the 'net unlocked the phone in about 2 seconds. Still, it was a problem that never should've happened.
That said, I'm on a Sony Ericsson P800 now and I love it - triband, totally unlocked, all of the goodies. I'm skipping the P900 for now (as it's just an incremental upgrade), but will probably pick up the next phone/PDA offering from SE (hopefully some-time in the summer/fall of next year).
They might enjoy the right to privacy if they can convince the courts that the prices in their store are classified national secrets or something, but I'm afraid that price information for a "big sale" doesn't quite cut it. If some stockboy decides to release their prices, they don't have much of a leg to stand on.
On the other hand, the website in question (which was involved in this during the last go-round I believe), is probably enjoying the extra attention and big spike in viewers that comes from this sort of trouble.
What they should be doing is exactly the same thing that Google does when they get a takedown notice - post it in full, including the itemized list of everything that they're being requested to remove.
Classic ;)
The other good one was from MadTV...
"Talk faster... Talk FASTER... TALK FASTER..."
N.
One of the interesting things here is the method by which the company chooses to "protect" their product. Security through obscurity it is, folks.
Rather than designing a somewhat more secure system to ensure that something like this doesn't happen (dedicated chip to encrypt photos with a key based on the camera's serial number or a randomly rotated key that is changed when the camera is brought back for prints to be made), it appears they've taken the alternative cost-saving measure of "using a nonstandard cable connection combined with their own image transfer software".
It's one of those interesting company dilemmas...
Do you:
a) Make an extremely difficult to hack camera that costs an extra $50 to produce with custom encryption chips, etc.
or
b) Create a cheaper camera with very basic methods of trying to prevent user downloads - cheap to produce, bad if hackers find out how to reverse engineer and load photos from. Then use some DMCA action to go after those who have hacked the flimsy protection on the camera.
Obviously "A" is safer in the longrun, but costs more capital upfront. Much more difficult to fund a pilot project which would have high initial startup costs to develop more secure technology.
Option "B" costs less upfront, but once the transfer software/methods have been made available on the net, the cat's out of the bag and there's no shoving the kitty back in again, no matter how much DMCA is utilized. The only other possibility is changing their business-plan. And that's what I bet is going to happen.
If I was a betting man, I'd say that knew that this would happen eventually, and hoped to hook enough consumers that when they had to get people to purchase the camera upfront, or put a deposit down, they'd already be sold on this style of photography.
There isn't much to these cameras however, so it could be argued that they didn't bother with heavy-duty anti-hacking protection because they'll be obsolete in a year and will be replaced with a better model. I can't see the cameras costing more than about $30-40 a piece to make mass-produced (and probably quite a bit less in volume), they're little more than glorified webcams. As such, a half dozen sets of prints would pay for the units - anything ontop of that is gravy.
In the meantime, the company will probably be developing version 2 with a better imager, better lens, and better protection against hardware hacking.
I think the camera idea here is a far better business plan than the late, unlamented cue-cat. If they simply implemented a "one camera per customer" database tracked by driver's license number or SIN, they'd minimize the damage enough that people who want to use the camera for legit purposes would probably still cover the cost of the cameras by people who wanted to download their own pictures.
The other (more realistic) option would be to have people buy the camera for $40, and receive 4 dozen free prints from it as part of the package, or to have people put down $40 as a deposit, and get it back when the camera is returned for processing.
N.
Yup, sneaking DRM in the back door a tiny little bit at a time is the only way to get stuff like this implemented.
Sadly, for the majority of uninformed consumers out there, it will work.
Here's waiting for a "Max Headroom" styled future with big networks that control your TV to the point where you can't even turn them off (or face fines/prison time for interfering with a broadcast).
Who knows, maybe the CRTC will make a good decision for once, and refuse to follow the lead of the FCC and will not mandate that Canadian sets will require the digital restrictions chips be implemented - or will allow them to be turned-off if desired.
It never ceases to amaze me how "suits don't get it". There is a HUGE trade on the net in old "classic" TV shows (depending on your point of view), everything from "Greatest American Hero", to "A-Team", to (as mentioned before) "Max Headroom". Regardless if you happen to like these particular series, people ARE downloading and watching them. If the companies involved were to make a subscription service available to watch old shows (complete with episode synopsis, cast/crew lists, etc), people would pay...
But of course it's a change from the "old fashioned way of doing things", and that scares the hell out of them.
N.
It may very well be that installing cracked n-gage games on other phones will be easier than performing the complex battery/compartment door/tinylittle memorycard operation involved in installing the real n-gage game modules inside the phone...
Speaking of course from north america...
Text messaging in other parts of the world is far more popular than voice calls. In some countries because it's free, or nearly free. Instead of paying $0.20/min, you just tap out a text message for free, or for $0.02
In some ways, I'd prefer it to getting some of the rambling voicemessages I seem to get. Rather than getting 2 minutes of someone blathering on, send me a couple lines of text message that are clear and concise.
Just no "l33t t3xt sp33ch" please.