Er, maybe I'm just cynical, but it (unfortunately) seems like both parties are willing to throw civil liberties under the bus when they think it's important; they differ mainly with regard to what they think is important. Call it a cynical hunch, but I suspect that if Obama were to appoint Janet Reno (Bill Clinton's attorney general) to the Supreme Court, she wouldn't be terribly eager to rein in the might of the federal government or limit the scope of its authority, and she's quite far to the left.
> Honestly, with consumer grade two-way satellite available at a starting price of $50/month from multiple providers, there are very, very few areas in the US that only have a single source of entartube access.
Satellite internet at any price is broadband for the damned and desperate. Even if cash were infinite, FAP didn't exist, and Hughes didn't take profound liberties with the definition of "tcp/ip", the speed of light and time it takes a radio signal to make a round trip through the Clarke belt would make it suck for most uses anyway.
I remember seeing an ad from a large company for a "webmaster" circa 1997. One of the requirements was 5+ years of experience with Java. I seriously doubt whether Gosling *himself* had "5+ years of experience with Java" back then, let alone anyone likely to apply for a job offering less than $30k/year in the early years of the dotcom boom...
> You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
I think it's more an act of pure revulsion that you're forced to join the Church of Steve by purchasing a fairly expensive computer you abhor as the condition of developing software for the iPhone, and THEN play "Mother, May I?" to get his proxied blessing (that has nothing to do with quality or content, and everything to do with it being "family-friendly", bland, and uncontroversial. Want to create an app that lets you go into the restroom, dust something a girl you just met at the bar touched for fingerprints, photograph them, instantly identify her from it, and read reviews posted by others about her performance in bed? I can guarantee there won't *ever* be a blessed iPhone app for it... but you'll probably find something comparable for Android by the middle of next summer. The world will never see "iSlut", but will almost certainly have "mySlut" before long, if only as a joke;-)
The day iPhones officially allow users to freely download and install unblessed apps (with a cute extension that implies sin, like ".eve"), I'll begin to respect iOS.
Someone please mod the parent up. I went through 3 years of fighting with a collection agency due to some guy who gave my phone number when he checked into a hospital. The moment they found out I wasn't him, they wouldn't even tell me who to contact to get myself permanently out of the loop. They'd promise to not call me again, and I'd get another call (presumably from a different collection agency) 3-4 months later. I finally had to lie and say I *was* him to trick them into giving me the info (that's how I found out it was a hospital bill), then forge a letter under that guy's name to the hospital demanding that they discontinue any and all communication with me, and pursue the matter in court if they so desired. I never heard from them again after that.
In any case, it's a major hole in debt-collection law. If you're the debtor, you can demand that they cease all communication (and pursue a lawsuit, if that's what they really intend to do). If you're NOT the debtor, you have basically NO legal recourse against being bothered over and over again by bill-collectors trying to collect someone else's debt.
> Android probably wouldn't exist if Apple hand't proven the smart phone concept.
*cough* *cough* *cough* *wheeze* *cough*
Apple did NOT invent smart phones or "prove the concept". Fer god's sake, I watched live weather radar images of Hurricane Wilma as it passed over Fort Lauderdale with my laptop tethered to my Sprint Samsung SPH-i500 PalmOS phone, and later fell back on the thirdparty browser app when my laptop's battery died. That was October 2005. It wasn't even my first PalmOS phone... I got my Samsung SPH-i300 in 2002.
Had Apple and Google never created IOS or Android, I'd probably be running Access Linux on a reflashed Sprint phone right now... or possibly Windows Mobile 7 ("Mobile", not "Phone") -- ugly and dysfunctional out of the box as ever, but de-facto free (as in liberty) to anyone who wanted to run apps without playing "Mother, May I?" first, and generally quite nice once you spent a week or two customizing it with thirdparty extensions.
> But if it cost a US user 20x as much to call someone in another state, things might have worked out differently.
Actually, we had the perverse irony (still do, in fact) that when calls weren't de-facto free, in-state long-distance calls were more expensive than state-to-state long-distance calls, and "local long-distance" calls (like Miami to West Palm Beach, were the most expensive domestic phone calls you could possibly make. If you're making a call from a landline phone with traditional metered long-distance charges, it's actually cheaper for someone in Miami to call a mobile phone in Bratislava than a landline phone in Boca Raton (~50 miles north).
The wholesale abandonment of landline phones by middle-class Americans had less to do with convenience than the fact that it was cheaper by ~2005 or so to use a cell phone with unlimited nationwide calls for everything than to deal with even the cheapest landline long-distance providers (who themselves had pricing policies that bordered on indecipherable and became exponentially more expensive unless you basically made phone calls that were always answered and lasted an hour or more). On one hand, it sucked that we had to pay (on paper, at least) for incoming calls, but in the long run we got lucky in America, because it put pressure on carriers to radically increase airtime and make entire classes of calls free.
They don't have to make it impossible for the keys to be effective... they just need to make it too hard for 99.9% of consumers to be able to do it.
If the Mafia (the real one, not the Music and Film Industry Association of America) wants to get Medeco (or other "un-duplicatable") keys duplicated, I'm sure they have at least one guy somewhere in the New York area who can do it and provide one-hour service with a smile. The point isn't that they can't be duplicated at all... the point is that you can't take a Medeco key to Home Depot or a store at the mall and get a copy made. Few people, even career criminals, would get their money's worth out of the investment needed to set up a key-duplication operation for keys sold without legal blanks. And in the case of an organization like the Mafia, there's so much economy of scale involved that when the police DO take down the guy doing key duplication for organized criminals in the northeastern US (and beyond), it's going to be a while before someone takes his place, because legality aside, nobody's going to want to spend the money to set up the operation only to find out that he has to share the business with a competitor. Not even the most prolific criminals need to have THAT many keys illegally duplicated.
Enables you to install a kernel with proper support for Bluetooth HID, so you can use a folding keyboard and/or bluetooth gamepad with the phone.
Enables you to create a swapfile and use virtual ram. See, Android has an official mechanism for reclaiming memory used by suspended apps, but it's not instantaneous. If you buy Class-6 (or faster) microSD flash, it's faster to just swap a chunk of ram to the flashcard than it is to wait for the app to shut itself down, save its state, and release its memory so something else can use it. If you use class 4 flash, it'll be roughly the same speed either way. If you use class 2 flash, swapping is slower. As you've probably guessed, the free microSD card that comes with most Android phones is only class 2.
Tether for free. Sprint charges $30/month extra if you want to tether without rooting.
Run the CPU faster. Unlike (Intel) desktop CPUs, phone CPUs don't really have a hard upper speed limit. They just go through a point where your battery life totally goes to hell, then a zone where they're kind of flaky and it crashes a lot, then finally a zone where it's almost impossible to use for more than a few minutes WITHOUT crashing. A rooted G2 can run at 1GHz without breaking a sweat, and I'm pretty sure I read that they're generally stable up to around 1.6GHz. The catch is, your battery will last about an hour at that speed.
You can use Samba to make your/sdcard filesystem accessible over the network as a normal Netbios share.
You can use OpenVPN. Unrooted Android can't use it, not even as a client.
You can install sshd and use SSH to securely connect to a root shell on your phone.
You can install thirdparty SSL root certs.
You can use Tor.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head. There are a lot more.
> These are miniature computers that handle phone calls as a subset of their capabilities.
Actually, it's even deeper than that. With every Android phone I'm aware of, the actual low-level "phone" functions are handled by a separate CPU (or core that's partitioned off as a de-facto second CPU), runs its own firmware, and basically looks a lot like a metaphorical voice modem to the rest of the OS (not entirely a coincidence... the first PalmOS PDA phones were basically cobbled-together agglomerations of a voicemodem chipset with a PDA and a cell phone, tied together by a serial bus. The metaphor stuck, even if the underlying hardware has been massively consolidated into 2 or 3 chips).
> All they really need is an indicator that it WAS hacked so they can choose to honor the warranty or not,
For the record, in the United States, a consumer can't be coerced into disclaiming a manufacturer's warranty, and a manufacturer can't disclaim a warranty for mere breach of contractual terms (least of all a contract of adhesion) unless the breach involved non-payment for a service contract or the manufacturer can demonstrate that whatever it is that the consumer did WAS, in fact, the reason for the failure.
It's called the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
Also, a few points that need to be repeated often:
* Few phones truly get "bricked". 99% of the time, someone screws up a reflash, panics when it doesn't reboot, posts a few messages online, hits google, then figures out 1-36 hours later that he needs to take out the battery, wait a minute or so, then power it back up with some nearly impossible combination of button-presses to trigger its REAL "last-chance" bootloader.
* It's almost impossible to truly cause real, honest-to-god permanent hardware damage to a recent-vintage phone by reflashing. Worst-case, it might take a minimum-wage employee at an authorized repair center with a JTAG a few minutes to reflash it.
> How can there be any ambiguity about this? Either it's 4th Generation, or it's not.
Er, no it's not, In Sprint's universe, at least (where international standards in general, and GSM in particular, are largely irrelevant), WiMax IS unambiguously their fourth major leap forward, and arguably their fourth major modulation change.
0G: prehistoric insofar as SprintPCS goes (Sprint Spectrum existed, but it was a totally unrelated company owned by Sprint that ended up being sold off and eventually agglomerating into the company that's now T-Mobile)
1G: IS95 -- CDMA voice with 9.6kbit/sec circuit-switched data
2G: CDMA2000 voice with 1xRTT data. Data is now adhoc, but still uses the same fundamental modulation scheme as voice. You can have one or the other, but not both at the same time. ~80-160kbit/sec real-world data speeds.
3G: CDMA2000 voice with EVDO data. Unlike 1xRTT, EVDO has a fundamentally different air interface. It's basically CDMA2000 overlaid onto time-division multiplexing. Real-world data speeds in the neighborhood of 250-600kbit/sec.
4G: CDMA 2000 voice with WiMax data. Utterly, totally, and completely different air interface ("radio"), with real-world data speeds in the neighborhood of 1-6mbit/sec (theoretically seen as high as 10mbit down and 1.2mbit up, with the main limit being Sprint/Clear's Tier-1 connectivity to the rest of the internet itself). 4G also adds another important new capability to Sprintland -- simultaneous voice and data.
The same argument can be made for Verizon, substituting "LTE" for "WiMax" in 4G. The truth is, there's nothing holy about Verizon's LTE. The Pope, Obama, Oprah, Justin Timberlake, Steve Jobs, and Lady Gaga could all personally bless its LTE'ness, and it still won't change the almost nonexistent likelihood that a nominally-LTE phone from AT&T (or Europe) will be able to successfully make use of it in any meaningful way. In real terms, Sprint/Clear WiMax and Verizon LTE are basically the K56flex and X2 of 4G wireless. Neither one is likely to go away soon (in the US, at least), because neither one really has any REASON to go away... they can both share the same spectrum (no need to set aside one chunk for LTE, and another separate chunk for WiMax), and making a radio at the tower end that can deal with both isn't a huge problem, because they differ mainly with respect to what happens AFTER you've decoded them to a a raw bitstream.
If anyone's being dishonest, it's T-Mobile. In the case of Verizon and Sprint, the ITU's official definition of "4G" is about as directly relevant to real-world networks as the OSI network model (it looks nice on paper, but it's basically impossible to cleanly map it to reality without putting dozens of asterisks and footnotes qualifying judgment calls about how to classify things). On the other hand, in the "GSM" universe, it could be argued that the ITU's definition has a much, much stronger and more clearly-defined meaning, partly because the ITU's own model is largely based on the way "GSM" works.
Then again, T-Mobile's innocence or guilt is a toss-up anyway. Where it works, it's almost as fast as Sprint's WiMax. However, Sprint's WiMax gives its customers 2-6mbit data speeds today in neighborhoods where T-Mobile customers are lucky to have viable EDGE -- even in cities that are alleged by T-Mobile to be solidly "4G". So, I'll give T-Mobile one point for being practically equivalent to Sprint anyway, then beat them up and kick them a little for wildly exaggerating their urban "4G" coverage area. In the 'burbs, it's not even a fair comparison... Sprint wins, hands down.
> Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc... > There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?
One problem with your theory -- the Neanderthals didn't actually look "Neanderthal" (the way most people think). If anything, Neanderthal genes are probably the reason why humans of north-central European descent are more likely to be blonde and/or have blue eyes. Think about it... pretty much everyone on earth with blonde hair and/or blue eyes can trace his/her ancestry to north-central Europe. Neanderthals lived in north-central Europe. For the past century, nobody has ever really had a good explanation how a group of humans from Africa somehow became blonde-haired and blue-eyed almost overnight (in evolutionary terms). If you get past the automatic prejudice against neanderthals that most humans have, the likely answer becomes instantly obvious: both blonde hair (and probably red hair) and blue eyes were probably the outcome of interbreeding between humans and neanderthals.
Remember, when most of us (20s/30s) were in elementary school, it was still taken as almost an article of faith that dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles with leathery skin... even the ones that flew. Now, even a bright 5 year old knows that birds are modern dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs themselves were probably big birds. Think: 30 foot tall ostrich with razor-sharp teeth and insatiable appetite for meat.
> How last century! (...snip...) cut the cable, and get an RS-232 - to Bluetooth adapter
Spoken by someone who's either a glutton for punishment, or has never experienced the joys of interacting with some piece of embedded hardware at low level through a bitchy, finicky translation layer like Bluetooth that was designed to fail rather than accidentally work without authentication and authorization.
Remember, people use the phone's serial port to do things that are almost by definition unsupported, undocumented, and might induce Steve Jobs angrily kill newborn kittens in a fit of rage. Under those circumstances, the LAST thing you need is a finicky, brittle abstraction layer standing between you and the bare metal to introduce even MORE opportunities for it to not work.
The Samsung Galaxy S family appears to have (among other things) a UART hidden on its USB port via the Fairchild FSA9480 chip.
This thread at xda-developers ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=8834946 ) suggests that if you put a 150k resistor (1% tolerance) between pins 4 and 5 and power up the phone, the two pins normally used for USB data will be repurposed as a serial console for the bootloader.
You can also explicitly toggle the FSA9480's mode via software (though not necessarily without root and your own kernel extensions).
Note that it's not using USB as serial... it's acting as an electronic crossbar, disconnecting the D+ and D- pins from the USB circuit, and connecting them to pins elsewhere that are a real UART. Think: old-fashioned telephone switchboard with patch cables and jacks that dynamically establish and tear down circuits as needed so a few physical pins can be put to occasional niche uses that wouldn't merit full-time pins of their own.
Personally, I suspect two pins on the headphone jack can be nudged into acting as a UART as well. Sigh. What the mod community really needs is for someone to raise the cash to pay a company that does intelligence reports for consumer electronic devices to tear down the Epic4G (or some other variant) and draw up a schematic showing which externally-accessible pins are connected to what (and how) inside the phone. There's a lot of good stuff inside of these phones that's undocumented publicly or via the official kernel source. Lots 'o happy bitbanging ahead!:-)
The Nexus One and Dream are both by HTC and are the only "official" developer devices (hence, their official presence in the official Android source repo), but the Samsung Galaxy S is the only recent family that's NOT an officially-blessed development device that nevertheless has a buildable kernel with proprietary drivers properly-implemented as loadable kernel modules available for download anyway.
The kernel source for every OTHER phone sold by HTC is a mess, with proprietary binaries compiled straight into the kernel in complete violation of both the letter and spirit of the GPL2, and simply ripped out of the source before HTC releases it publicly.
Put another way, if you download the source to the Evo and Epic4G from the respective manufacturers and set out to compile a brand new kernel from scratch, you'll have a fairly easy task with the Epic, and a very, very difficult task with the Evo. The Epic had custom kernels before it even had a 100% working replacement bootloader. The Evo's homebrew scene has worked miracles, but the Epic's (and by extension, Galaxy S family's) developers had it handed to them on a gold platter with a hot fudge sundae for dessert.
Right now, the Galaxy S family is pretty much the most open rom-development-officially-unsupported family of Android phones you can buy. The supreme irony, in fact, is that it's a LOT harder to root a Nexus One in a way that can be secretly unrooted later should a warranty repair be necessary (See, HTC apparently never heard of a law called the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act that basically says point blank that you can't categorically invalidate a product's warranty unless you can demonstrate that the failure was a direct result of the consumer's allegedly warranty-voiding act; the law gives consumers specific FTC-enforced rights that can't be waived or disclaimed -- especially not by a contract of adhesion). HTC makes a point of shooting itself in the foot. Samsung just remains silent, looks the other way, and lets its users have their fun.
Actually, real honest-to-god unrecoverable bricking is pretty rare. In fact, it's almost unheard of for anyone not on the absolute trailblazing bleeding-edge of rooting a new phone to actually do it.
Most of the "bricked" phones posted about online are third-tier users who know enough to root their phones, but not enough to know how to back out of trouble when something goes wrong, and instantly say their phone is "bricked" because it no longer boots up. 99.9% of the time, they spend a few hours online, discover that they need to take out the battery, wait 30 seconds, possibly copy something to the microSD card, put the battery back in, then power back up while pressing some combination of buttons intended to be non-obvious. Then their phone works again, and they're back on track to eliteness.
The main annoyance with trying other Android distros is the fact that they all expect you to blow everything away and start over from scratch first. Google reduces the pain a bit by at least allowing you to restore your contacts, but it gets old quickly.
Really, that's the main difference between upgrading a rooted phone to the latest and greatest now, vs waiting 2-6 months for the carrier to release its gimped official upgrade: the gimped official upgrade mostly Just Works and installs transparently, while the guerrilla upgrades require virgin installations on wiped flash.
IMHO, another part of the problem is the way lots of Android distros blur the line between apps and Android, which causes much of the need to wipe everything before installation because they end up moving things around and putting apps and data in places that are distro-specific, if not slightly weird and bizarre. I think part of it is because most of the leaders behind Android's "ROM Scene" came from Windows Mobile rather than desktop Linux, and as a result we kind of ended up with the worst of both. If you look at lots of the Android distros/roms available, the AOSP ones tend to be architecturally better and less brittle, because the people behind them seem to have a better understanding of Linux in general and how it's supposed to work.
The unsurprising result is that the phones that are locked down the hardest unsurprisingly have the most brittle custom ROMs, and the phones that are more or less blown wide open (by hacking, if not manufacturer/carrier intent) running custom Android distros built from the kernel up tend to be the most stable. It's a major reason why I ended up sticking with the Epic4G instead of jumping ship to the Evo. In the long run, the Epic's kernel and source is just better and more maintainable. The Evo got the early mindshare and most of the hardcore developers, but I think the Samsung phones are going to end up with a longer and more productive homebrew lifespan because there's no need to dick around with patched kernels ripped from other phones... you can just build a proper one from scratch, because the source is perfectly good and buildable on its own.
More importantly, inflation isn't necessarily "good" -- but deflation is *deadly*. When the most profitable thing you can do with a million dollars is put it in a safe and wait, business and economies grind to a halt and go down in flames. Especially things that cost a lot of money and have long supply chains. Would anyone knowingly and intentionally spend $250,000 to buy land and build a house that they'll only be able to sell for $180,000? Or spend $20,000 to build a car that will only be worth $18,000 when it's done? As a one-off loss-leading strategy, maybe. As a way of doing business daily, of course not. When any productive endeavor you could possibly invest money in is almost guaranteed to lose value compared to the cash itself, investment effectively ceases to be a viable option. Investment is what keeps economies alive. Thus, it's *imperative* that there always be some (preferably stable) level of inflation to nudge people with money towards productively investing it instead of just sitting on the cash.
I'll concur that on my Epic, wimax DOES seem to be solidly faster than wifi inside my house... but then again, my router (Linksys WRP400) utterly sucks for wi-fi, and the Epic's wi-fi is pretty mediocre, too. Mix in Comcast maxing out at 16mbit/sec down (largely theoretical) and capped at 256kbit up (on the dot), compare that to the 6-8mbit/sec down and 800-900kbit/sec up I routinely get indoors with wimax (pegged to ~9mbit down and 1.2mbit up if I go outside), and it's unsurprising that wimax looks good.
On the other hand, Sprint's 3G in my area (southwestern Broward County) absolutely, positively sucks. Like, 80-100kbit down, and 160-240kbit up -- with 5 out of 6 alleged bars of 3G signal strength. I'm pretty sure Sprint's uninspiring 3G performance in my neighborhood is backhaul-induced and has nothing to do with 1900MHz spectrum availability or signal strength, because it's pretty constant wherever I go -- 1 bar, 6 bars, same slow 3G. It's like they've only got a single T1 line leased from BellSouth/AT&T for everyone touching that tower to share...
> Coverage tends to get better as you near the city's core.
It depends. I live ~15 miles southwest of downtown Fort Lauderdale, and routinely get the throttled-max throughput Sprint will allow me to have: ~9mbit down, ~1.2mbit up (I'm about a quarter-mile away from the tower). My experience has been that the closer I get to downtown, the SLOWER and spottier it gets, because then you have more users and more wimax-shadows caused by tall buildings. One of the more amusing wimax shadows is visible at the Sprint store in Pembroke Pines (by the mall). Stand on the sidewalk, and get 7-8mbit down. Go inside the store and stand by the window, and it "kind of" still works. Walk over to the Epic and Evo display, and it's a total 4G dead zone. If I were the manager at that Sprint store, and I couldn't get my hands on a WiMax repeater, I'd make DAMN sure I moved the Epic and Evo displays to the front of the store by the window so their 4G would work. But knowing how Sprint stores are run, the manager probably doesn't even REALIZE (or care) there's been a live 4G tower less than a mile away for the past 4-6 weeks since it hasn't been Officially Announced(TM) yet...
> Setting up and tearing down radio resource connections all the time has a burden on the network.
Most of the aggressive instant teardowns are due to the criminally-inadequate batteries shipped with the iPhone and every gigahertz+ Android phone that will leave you "powerless" in 4-6 hours without aggressive battery management. If carriers like T-Mobile want to reduce the teardown rate, they could start by telling companies like HTC and Samsung to ship the damn phones with adequately-sized batteries in the first place. It really says something when you go to web forums for high-end HTC, Samsung, and Motorola Android phones, and more or less HALF the postings are directly or indirectly related to battery life. Aftermarket extended batteries are a piss poor option, because the form factor of the phone usually ends of constraining them into an obnoxious tumor-like lump instead of an extra millimeter of overall girth.
Five years ago, the Samsung SPH-I500 was almost regarded as "fatally flawed" because its battery *barely* could make it through 16-20 hours without a charge. Then Steve Jobs told the world it was normal and OK for phones to die after being away from a charger for 4 hours because it made the phone look thin and sexy, and the entire industry abandoned its common sense and blindly followed with undersized batteries. Fuck, it pisses me off. Imagine how much fun someone like Motorola could have if they'd released the DroidX with a beefy -- yet sculpted and well-distributed -- 3000+mAH battery that enabled it to run full-bore for 24 hours on a single charge with no real power management to speak of. They could have *shredded* the Evo/DesireHD and Galaxy S for dying by mid-afternoon, comparing them to anorexic models competing in the Ironman and dropping dead halfway through, and HTC & Samsung wouldn't have any real recourse besides sending everyone a free battery as an apology, and making sure their NEXT generation of phones had nice, beefy batteries too.
Hell, they could even resurrect Sir Mix-a-Lot's career for the commercials.
"When it comes to battlife, SteveJobs got nothin' to do with my selection. Four hours -- maybe six -- not all day? Not MY phone!" (sound of cracking whip amidst dancing troupe of big-backed 'Droids)
Name 1000 *permutations* of motherboards, CPUs, hard drives, and dual-channel matched pairs of ram. Much, much easier. You could probably hit 1000 viable permutations without even considering anything that's out of stock at a CompUSA retail store, and without cheating by adding second hard drives to inflate the number of permutations.
Personally, I wish they'd just condense the bare radio interface down to a module the size of a small USB wifi interface, standardize the form factor, and let consumers buy any pocket computer they like and just stick the radio module from the relevant company into it without interference from the carriers.
> You want to be choosing between thousands of different phones? You're mad.
You mean, like choosing between thousands of permutations of CPUs, motherboards, hard drives (or SSDs), cooling systems, RAM timing, and videocards? Yes.
When you have 10 choices, they get locked down and have to be hacked by their owners to do what WE want instead of what the carriers want them to do.
When you have a thousand choices, you can have a few crushingly-locked-down phones for the unwashed masses that make the carriers happy (the Apple universe), a few equally locked-down phones that pretend to be open, but generally exist to make the other carriers happy (Android), and several hundred whose makers don't even bother to lock them down because they know it's futile, will just piss off their buyers, and because they themselves just grabbed a copy of Android from the AOSP repository a few weeks earlier.
The carriers want neat, walled gardens where a half-dozen neutered flowers surrounded by barbed wire will bloom on schedule in a predictable and orderly manner. They hate the idea that something unpredictable and disruptive might suddenly appear, become popular, and scramble their Five Year Plan in a way that makes the final 4 years of it completely obsolete almost overnight.
Screw walled gardens and closed, locked-down hardware that consumers never get to truly own. Let a thousand flowers bloom.;-)
Because in the mid-90s, GSM didn't exist, and CDMA was utterly and completely superior to GSM's core legacy technology (TDMA) in every meaningful way -- efficiency, robustness, call quality, the works. Sprint was the first company to own nationwide spectrum and build a brand new network from the ground up. Since they had no legacy baggage, and no need to interoperate with anyone, there was no reason for them to NOT go with CDMA. Verizon was originally a fairly small regional carrier that grew by acquiring lots of other regional carriers. It went with CDMA for the same reason as Sprint -- if you're building a brand new network with no legacy baggage CDMA was just plain better.
Believe it or not, *AT&T* almost switched to CDMA around 2002 or 2003. They realized TDMA was a dead end and were about to shut down their analog network, and it came down to GSM or CDMA. The only reason they went with GSM was because their merger with Cingular was approved, and Cingular had already committed to GSM.
For the record, CDMA has always supported an extension to SIM cards to achieve the exact same purpose. The problem is that Qualcomm allowed Sprint and Verizon to solder the chips into the phone instead of make them removable cards, and Sprint & Verizon did precisely that just because they could. Go to other countries that use CDMA, and the CDMA phones there are every bit as interoperable as GSM phones are in Europe.
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Er, maybe I'm just cynical, but it (unfortunately) seems like both parties are willing to throw civil liberties under the bus when they think it's important; they differ mainly with regard to what they think is important. Call it a cynical hunch, but I suspect that if Obama were to appoint Janet Reno (Bill Clinton's attorney general) to the Supreme Court, she wouldn't be terribly eager to rein in the might of the federal government or limit the scope of its authority, and she's quite far to the left.
> Honestly, with consumer grade two-way satellite available at a starting price of $50/month from multiple providers, there are very, very few areas in the US that only have a single source of entartube access.
Satellite internet at any price is broadband for the damned and desperate. Even if cash were infinite, FAP didn't exist, and Hughes didn't take profound liberties with the definition of "tcp/ip", the speed of light and time it takes a radio signal to make a round trip through the Clarke belt would make it suck for most uses anyway.
I remember seeing an ad from a large company for a "webmaster" circa 1997. One of the requirements was 5+ years of experience with Java. I seriously doubt whether Gosling *himself* had "5+ years of experience with Java" back then, let alone anyone likely to apply for a job offering less than $30k/year in the early years of the dotcom boom...
> You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
I think it's more an act of pure revulsion that you're forced to join the Church of Steve by purchasing a fairly expensive computer you abhor as the condition of developing software for the iPhone, and THEN play "Mother, May I?" to get his proxied blessing (that has nothing to do with quality or content, and everything to do with it being "family-friendly", bland, and uncontroversial. Want to create an app that lets you go into the restroom, dust something a girl you just met at the bar touched for fingerprints, photograph them, instantly identify her from it, and read reviews posted by others about her performance in bed? I can guarantee there won't *ever* be a blessed iPhone app for it... but you'll probably find something comparable for Android by the middle of next summer. The world will never see "iSlut", but will almost certainly have "mySlut" before long, if only as a joke ;-)
The day iPhones officially allow users to freely download and install unblessed apps (with a cute extension that implies sin, like ".eve"), I'll begin to respect iOS.
Someone please mod the parent up. I went through 3 years of fighting with a collection agency due to some guy who gave my phone number when he checked into a hospital. The moment they found out I wasn't him, they wouldn't even tell me who to contact to get myself permanently out of the loop. They'd promise to not call me again, and I'd get another call (presumably from a different collection agency) 3-4 months later. I finally had to lie and say I *was* him to trick them into giving me the info (that's how I found out it was a hospital bill), then forge a letter under that guy's name to the hospital demanding that they discontinue any and all communication with me, and pursue the matter in court if they so desired. I never heard from them again after that.
In any case, it's a major hole in debt-collection law. If you're the debtor, you can demand that they cease all communication (and pursue a lawsuit, if that's what they really intend to do). If you're NOT the debtor, you have basically NO legal recourse against being bothered over and over again by bill-collectors trying to collect someone else's debt.
> Android probably wouldn't exist if Apple hand't proven the smart phone concept.
*cough* *cough* *cough* *wheeze* *cough*
Apple did NOT invent smart phones or "prove the concept". Fer god's sake, I watched live weather radar images of Hurricane Wilma as it passed over Fort Lauderdale with my laptop tethered to my Sprint Samsung SPH-i500 PalmOS phone, and later fell back on the thirdparty browser app when my laptop's battery died. That was October 2005. It wasn't even my first PalmOS phone... I got my Samsung SPH-i300 in 2002.
Had Apple and Google never created IOS or Android, I'd probably be running Access Linux on a reflashed Sprint phone right now... or possibly Windows Mobile 7 ("Mobile", not "Phone") -- ugly and dysfunctional out of the box as ever, but de-facto free (as in liberty) to anyone who wanted to run apps without playing "Mother, May I?" first, and generally quite nice once you spent a week or two customizing it with thirdparty extensions.
> But if it cost a US user 20x as much to call someone in another state, things might have worked out differently.
Actually, we had the perverse irony (still do, in fact) that when calls weren't de-facto free, in-state long-distance calls were more expensive than state-to-state long-distance calls, and "local long-distance" calls (like Miami to West Palm Beach, were the most expensive domestic phone calls you could possibly make. If you're making a call from a landline phone with traditional metered long-distance charges, it's actually cheaper for someone in Miami to call a mobile phone in Bratislava than a landline phone in Boca Raton (~50 miles north).
The wholesale abandonment of landline phones by middle-class Americans had less to do with convenience than the fact that it was cheaper by ~2005 or so to use a cell phone with unlimited nationwide calls for everything than to deal with even the cheapest landline long-distance providers (who themselves had pricing policies that bordered on indecipherable and became exponentially more expensive unless you basically made phone calls that were always answered and lasted an hour or more). On one hand, it sucked that we had to pay (on paper, at least) for incoming calls, but in the long run we got lucky in America, because it put pressure on carriers to radically increase airtime and make entire classes of calls free.
They don't have to make it impossible for the keys to be effective... they just need to make it too hard for 99.9% of consumers to be able to do it.
If the Mafia (the real one, not the Music and Film Industry Association of America) wants to get Medeco (or other "un-duplicatable") keys duplicated, I'm sure they have at least one guy somewhere in the New York area who can do it and provide one-hour service with a smile. The point isn't that they can't be duplicated at all... the point is that you can't take a Medeco key to Home Depot or a store at the mall and get a copy made. Few people, even career criminals, would get their money's worth out of the investment needed to set up a key-duplication operation for keys sold without legal blanks. And in the case of an organization like the Mafia, there's so much economy of scale involved that when the police DO take down the guy doing key duplication for organized criminals in the northeastern US (and beyond), it's going to be a while before someone takes his place, because legality aside, nobody's going to want to spend the money to set up the operation only to find out that he has to share the business with a competitor. Not even the most prolific criminals need to have THAT many keys illegally duplicated.
Enables you to install a kernel with proper support for Bluetooth HID, so you can use a folding keyboard and/or bluetooth gamepad with the phone.
Enables you to create a swapfile and use virtual ram. See, Android has an official mechanism for reclaiming memory used by suspended apps, but it's not instantaneous. If you buy Class-6 (or faster) microSD flash, it's faster to just swap a chunk of ram to the flashcard than it is to wait for the app to shut itself down, save its state, and release its memory so something else can use it. If you use class 4 flash, it'll be roughly the same speed either way. If you use class 2 flash, swapping is slower. As you've probably guessed, the free microSD card that comes with most Android phones is only class 2.
Tether for free. Sprint charges $30/month extra if you want to tether without rooting.
Run the CPU faster. Unlike (Intel) desktop CPUs, phone CPUs don't really have a hard upper speed limit. They just go through a point where your battery life totally goes to hell, then a zone where they're kind of flaky and it crashes a lot, then finally a zone where it's almost impossible to use for more than a few minutes WITHOUT crashing. A rooted G2 can run at 1GHz without breaking a sweat, and I'm pretty sure I read that they're generally stable up to around 1.6GHz. The catch is, your battery will last about an hour at that speed.
You can use Samba to make your /sdcard filesystem accessible over the network as a normal Netbios share.
You can use OpenVPN. Unrooted Android can't use it, not even as a client.
You can install sshd and use SSH to securely connect to a root shell on your phone.
You can install thirdparty SSL root certs.
You can use Tor.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head. There are a lot more.
> These are miniature computers that handle phone calls as a subset of their capabilities.
Actually, it's even deeper than that. With every Android phone I'm aware of, the actual low-level "phone" functions are handled by a separate CPU (or core that's partitioned off as a de-facto second CPU), runs its own firmware, and basically looks a lot like a metaphorical voice modem to the rest of the OS (not entirely a coincidence... the first PalmOS PDA phones were basically cobbled-together agglomerations of a voicemodem chipset with a PDA and a cell phone, tied together by a serial bus. The metaphor stuck, even if the underlying hardware has been massively consolidated into 2 or 3 chips).
> All they really need is an indicator that it WAS hacked so they can choose to honor the warranty or not,
For the record, in the United States, a consumer can't be coerced into disclaiming a manufacturer's warranty, and a manufacturer can't disclaim a warranty for mere breach of contractual terms (least of all a contract of adhesion) unless the breach involved non-payment for a service contract or the manufacturer can demonstrate that whatever it is that the consumer did WAS, in fact, the reason for the failure.
It's called the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
Also, a few points that need to be repeated often:
* Few phones truly get "bricked". 99% of the time, someone screws up a reflash, panics when it doesn't reboot, posts a few messages online, hits google, then figures out 1-36 hours later that he needs to take out the battery, wait a minute or so, then power it back up with some nearly impossible combination of button-presses to trigger its REAL "last-chance" bootloader.
* It's almost impossible to truly cause real, honest-to-god permanent hardware damage to a recent-vintage phone by reflashing. Worst-case, it might take a minimum-wage employee at an authorized repair center with a JTAG a few minutes to reflash it.
> We were the fucking vanguard of cell data in this country. The AT&T iPhone was the phone to own.
Until, that is, they got owned by the Rogue Rooted Android Alliance ;-)
> How can there be any ambiguity about this? Either it's 4th Generation, or it's not.
Er, no it's not, In Sprint's universe, at least (where international standards in general, and GSM in particular, are largely irrelevant), WiMax IS unambiguously their fourth major leap forward, and arguably their fourth major modulation change.
0G: prehistoric insofar as SprintPCS goes (Sprint Spectrum existed, but it was a totally unrelated company owned by Sprint that ended up being sold off and eventually agglomerating into the company that's now T-Mobile)
1G: IS95 -- CDMA voice with 9.6kbit/sec circuit-switched data
2G: CDMA2000 voice with 1xRTT data. Data is now adhoc, but still uses the same fundamental modulation scheme as voice. You can have one or the other, but not both at the same time. ~80-160kbit/sec real-world data speeds.
3G: CDMA2000 voice with EVDO data. Unlike 1xRTT, EVDO has a fundamentally different air interface. It's basically CDMA2000 overlaid onto time-division multiplexing. Real-world data speeds in the neighborhood of 250-600kbit/sec.
4G: CDMA 2000 voice with WiMax data. Utterly, totally, and completely different air interface ("radio"), with real-world data speeds in the neighborhood of 1-6mbit/sec (theoretically seen as high as 10mbit down and 1.2mbit up, with the main limit being Sprint/Clear's Tier-1 connectivity to the rest of the internet itself). 4G also adds another important new capability to Sprintland -- simultaneous voice and data.
The same argument can be made for Verizon, substituting "LTE" for "WiMax" in 4G. The truth is, there's nothing holy about Verizon's LTE. The Pope, Obama, Oprah, Justin Timberlake, Steve Jobs, and Lady Gaga could all personally bless its LTE'ness, and it still won't change the almost nonexistent likelihood that a nominally-LTE phone from AT&T (or Europe) will be able to successfully make use of it in any meaningful way. In real terms, Sprint/Clear WiMax and Verizon LTE are basically the K56flex and X2 of 4G wireless. Neither one is likely to go away soon (in the US, at least), because neither one really has any REASON to go away... they can both share the same spectrum (no need to set aside one chunk for LTE, and another separate chunk for WiMax), and making a radio at the tower end that can deal with both isn't a huge problem, because they differ mainly with respect to what happens AFTER you've decoded them to a a raw bitstream.
If anyone's being dishonest, it's T-Mobile. In the case of Verizon and Sprint, the ITU's official definition of "4G" is about as directly relevant to real-world networks as the OSI network model (it looks nice on paper, but it's basically impossible to cleanly map it to reality without putting dozens of asterisks and footnotes qualifying judgment calls about how to classify things). On the other hand, in the "GSM" universe, it could be argued that the ITU's definition has a much, much stronger and more clearly-defined meaning, partly because the ITU's own model is largely based on the way "GSM" works.
Then again, T-Mobile's innocence or guilt is a toss-up anyway. Where it works, it's almost as fast as Sprint's WiMax. However, Sprint's WiMax gives its customers 2-6mbit data speeds today in neighborhoods where T-Mobile customers are lucky to have viable EDGE -- even in cities that are alleged by T-Mobile to be solidly "4G". So, I'll give T-Mobile one point for being practically equivalent to Sprint anyway, then beat them up and kick them a little for wildly exaggerating their urban "4G" coverage area. In the 'burbs, it's not even a fair comparison... Sprint wins, hands down.
> Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc...
> There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?
One problem with your theory -- the Neanderthals didn't actually look "Neanderthal" (the way most people think). If anything, Neanderthal genes are probably the reason why humans of north-central European descent are more likely to be blonde and/or have blue eyes. Think about it... pretty much everyone on earth with blonde hair and/or blue eyes can trace his/her ancestry to north-central Europe. Neanderthals lived in north-central Europe. For the past century, nobody has ever really had a good explanation how a group of humans from Africa somehow became blonde-haired and blue-eyed almost overnight (in evolutionary terms). If you get past the automatic prejudice against neanderthals that most humans have, the likely answer becomes instantly obvious: both blonde hair (and probably red hair) and blue eyes were probably the outcome of interbreeding between humans and neanderthals.
Remember, when most of us (20s/30s) were in elementary school, it was still taken as almost an article of faith that dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles with leathery skin... even the ones that flew. Now, even a bright 5 year old knows that birds are modern dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs themselves were probably big birds. Think: 30 foot tall ostrich with razor-sharp teeth and insatiable appetite for meat.
> How last century! (...snip...) cut the cable, and get an RS-232 - to Bluetooth adapter
Spoken by someone who's either a glutton for punishment, or has never experienced the joys of interacting with some piece of embedded hardware at low level through a bitchy, finicky translation layer like Bluetooth that was designed to fail rather than accidentally work without authentication and authorization.
Remember, people use the phone's serial port to do things that are almost by definition unsupported, undocumented, and might induce Steve Jobs angrily kill newborn kittens in a fit of rage. Under those circumstances, the LAST thing you need is a finicky, brittle abstraction layer standing between you and the bare metal to introduce even MORE opportunities for it to not work.
The Samsung Galaxy S family appears to have (among other things) a UART hidden on its USB port via the Fairchild FSA9480 chip.
This thread at xda-developers ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=8834946 ) suggests that if you put a 150k resistor (1% tolerance) between pins 4 and 5 and power up the phone, the two pins normally used for USB data will be repurposed as a serial console for the bootloader.
You can also explicitly toggle the FSA9480's mode via software (though not necessarily without root and your own kernel extensions).
Note that it's not using USB as serial... it's acting as an electronic crossbar, disconnecting the D+ and D- pins from the USB circuit, and connecting them to pins elsewhere that are a real UART. Think: old-fashioned telephone switchboard with patch cables and jacks that dynamically establish and tear down circuits as needed so a few physical pins can be put to occasional niche uses that wouldn't merit full-time pins of their own.
Personally, I suspect two pins on the headphone jack can be nudged into acting as a UART as well. Sigh. What the mod community really needs is for someone to raise the cash to pay a company that does intelligence reports for consumer electronic devices to tear down the Epic4G (or some other variant) and draw up a schematic showing which externally-accessible pins are connected to what (and how) inside the phone. There's a lot of good stuff inside of these phones that's undocumented publicly or via the official kernel source. Lots 'o happy bitbanging ahead! :-)
The Nexus One and Dream are both by HTC and are the only "official" developer devices (hence, their official presence in the official Android source repo), but the Samsung Galaxy S is the only recent family that's NOT an officially-blessed development device that nevertheless has a buildable kernel with proprietary drivers properly-implemented as loadable kernel modules available for download anyway.
The kernel source for every OTHER phone sold by HTC is a mess, with proprietary binaries compiled straight into the kernel in complete violation of both the letter and spirit of the GPL2, and simply ripped out of the source before HTC releases it publicly.
Put another way, if you download the source to the Evo and Epic4G from the respective manufacturers and set out to compile a brand new kernel from scratch, you'll have a fairly easy task with the Epic, and a very, very difficult task with the Evo. The Epic had custom kernels before it even had a 100% working replacement bootloader. The Evo's homebrew scene has worked miracles, but the Epic's (and by extension, Galaxy S family's) developers had it handed to them on a gold platter with a hot fudge sundae for dessert.
Right now, the Galaxy S family is pretty much the most open rom-development-officially-unsupported family of Android phones you can buy. The supreme irony, in fact, is that it's a LOT harder to root a Nexus One in a way that can be secretly unrooted later should a warranty repair be necessary (See, HTC apparently never heard of a law called the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act that basically says point blank that you can't categorically invalidate a product's warranty unless you can demonstrate that the failure was a direct result of the consumer's allegedly warranty-voiding act; the law gives consumers specific FTC-enforced rights that can't be waived or disclaimed -- especially not by a contract of adhesion). HTC makes a point of shooting itself in the foot. Samsung just remains silent, looks the other way, and lets its users have their fun.
Actually, real honest-to-god unrecoverable bricking is pretty rare. In fact, it's almost unheard of for anyone not on the absolute trailblazing bleeding-edge of rooting a new phone to actually do it.
Most of the "bricked" phones posted about online are third-tier users who know enough to root their phones, but not enough to know how to back out of trouble when something goes wrong, and instantly say their phone is "bricked" because it no longer boots up. 99.9% of the time, they spend a few hours online, discover that they need to take out the battery, wait 30 seconds, possibly copy something to the microSD card, put the battery back in, then power back up while pressing some combination of buttons intended to be non-obvious. Then their phone works again, and they're back on track to eliteness.
The main annoyance with trying other Android distros is the fact that they all expect you to blow everything away and start over from scratch first. Google reduces the pain a bit by at least allowing you to restore your contacts, but it gets old quickly.
Really, that's the main difference between upgrading a rooted phone to the latest and greatest now, vs waiting 2-6 months for the carrier to release its gimped official upgrade: the gimped official upgrade mostly Just Works and installs transparently, while the guerrilla upgrades require virgin installations on wiped flash.
IMHO, another part of the problem is the way lots of Android distros blur the line between apps and Android, which causes much of the need to wipe everything before installation because they end up moving things around and putting apps and data in places that are distro-specific, if not slightly weird and bizarre. I think part of it is because most of the leaders behind Android's "ROM Scene" came from Windows Mobile rather than desktop Linux, and as a result we kind of ended up with the worst of both. If you look at lots of the Android distros/roms available, the AOSP ones tend to be architecturally better and less brittle, because the people behind them seem to have a better understanding of Linux in general and how it's supposed to work.
The unsurprising result is that the phones that are locked down the hardest unsurprisingly have the most brittle custom ROMs, and the phones that are more or less blown wide open (by hacking, if not manufacturer/carrier intent) running custom Android distros built from the kernel up tend to be the most stable. It's a major reason why I ended up sticking with the Epic4G instead of jumping ship to the Evo. In the long run, the Epic's kernel and source is just better and more maintainable. The Evo got the early mindshare and most of the hardcore developers, but I think the Samsung phones are going to end up with a longer and more productive homebrew lifespan because there's no need to dick around with patched kernels ripped from other phones... you can just build a proper one from scratch, because the source is perfectly good and buildable on its own.
Viva Cyanogen :-)
More importantly, inflation isn't necessarily "good" -- but deflation is *deadly*. When the most profitable thing you can do with a million dollars is put it in a safe and wait, business and economies grind to a halt and go down in flames. Especially things that cost a lot of money and have long supply chains. Would anyone knowingly and intentionally spend $250,000 to buy land and build a house that they'll only be able to sell for $180,000? Or spend $20,000 to build a car that will only be worth $18,000 when it's done? As a one-off loss-leading strategy, maybe. As a way of doing business daily, of course not. When any productive endeavor you could possibly invest money in is almost guaranteed to lose value compared to the cash itself, investment effectively ceases to be a viable option. Investment is what keeps economies alive. Thus, it's *imperative* that there always be some (preferably stable) level of inflation to nudge people with money towards productively investing it instead of just sitting on the cash.
I'll concur that on my Epic, wimax DOES seem to be solidly faster than wifi inside my house... but then again, my router (Linksys WRP400) utterly sucks for wi-fi, and the Epic's wi-fi is pretty mediocre, too. Mix in Comcast maxing out at 16mbit/sec down (largely theoretical) and capped at 256kbit up (on the dot), compare that to the 6-8mbit/sec down and 800-900kbit/sec up I routinely get indoors with wimax (pegged to ~9mbit down and 1.2mbit up if I go outside), and it's unsurprising that wimax looks good.
On the other hand, Sprint's 3G in my area (southwestern Broward County) absolutely, positively sucks. Like, 80-100kbit down, and 160-240kbit up -- with 5 out of 6 alleged bars of 3G signal strength. I'm pretty sure Sprint's uninspiring 3G performance in my neighborhood is backhaul-induced and has nothing to do with 1900MHz spectrum availability or signal strength, because it's pretty constant wherever I go -- 1 bar, 6 bars, same slow 3G. It's like they've only got a single T1 line leased from BellSouth/AT&T for everyone touching that tower to share...
> Coverage tends to get better as you near the city's core.
It depends. I live ~15 miles southwest of downtown Fort Lauderdale, and routinely get the throttled-max throughput Sprint will allow me to have: ~9mbit down, ~1.2mbit up (I'm about a quarter-mile away from the tower). My experience has been that the closer I get to downtown, the SLOWER and spottier it gets, because then you have more users and more wimax-shadows caused by tall buildings. One of the more amusing wimax shadows is visible at the Sprint store in Pembroke Pines (by the mall). Stand on the sidewalk, and get 7-8mbit down. Go inside the store and stand by the window, and it "kind of" still works. Walk over to the Epic and Evo display, and it's a total 4G dead zone. If I were the manager at that Sprint store, and I couldn't get my hands on a WiMax repeater, I'd make DAMN sure I moved the Epic and Evo displays to the front of the store by the window so their 4G would work. But knowing how Sprint stores are run, the manager probably doesn't even REALIZE (or care) there's been a live 4G tower less than a mile away for the past 4-6 weeks since it hasn't been Officially Announced(TM) yet...
> Setting up and tearing down radio resource connections all the time has a burden on the network.
Most of the aggressive instant teardowns are due to the criminally-inadequate batteries shipped with the iPhone and every gigahertz+ Android phone that will leave you "powerless" in 4-6 hours without aggressive battery management. If carriers like T-Mobile want to reduce the teardown rate, they could start by telling companies like HTC and Samsung to ship the damn phones with adequately-sized batteries in the first place. It really says something when you go to web forums for high-end HTC, Samsung, and Motorola Android phones, and more or less HALF the postings are directly or indirectly related to battery life. Aftermarket extended batteries are a piss poor option, because the form factor of the phone usually ends of constraining them into an obnoxious tumor-like lump instead of an extra millimeter of overall girth.
Five years ago, the Samsung SPH-I500 was almost regarded as "fatally flawed" because its battery *barely* could make it through 16-20 hours without a charge. Then Steve Jobs told the world it was normal and OK for phones to die after being away from a charger for 4 hours because it made the phone look thin and sexy, and the entire industry abandoned its common sense and blindly followed with undersized batteries. Fuck, it pisses me off. Imagine how much fun someone like Motorola could have if they'd released the DroidX with a beefy -- yet sculpted and well-distributed -- 3000+mAH battery that enabled it to run full-bore for 24 hours on a single charge with no real power management to speak of. They could have *shredded* the Evo/DesireHD and Galaxy S for dying by mid-afternoon, comparing them to anorexic models competing in the Ironman and dropping dead halfway through, and HTC & Samsung wouldn't have any real recourse besides sending everyone a free battery as an apology, and making sure their NEXT generation of phones had nice, beefy batteries too.
Hell, they could even resurrect Sir Mix-a-Lot's career for the commercials.
"When it comes to battlife, SteveJobs got nothin' to do with my selection. Four hours -- maybe six -- not all day? Not MY phone!" (sound of cracking whip amidst dancing troupe of big-backed 'Droids)
Name 1000 *permutations* of motherboards, CPUs, hard drives, and dual-channel matched pairs of ram. Much, much easier. You could probably hit 1000 viable permutations without even considering anything that's out of stock at a CompUSA retail store, and without cheating by adding second hard drives to inflate the number of permutations.
Personally, I wish they'd just condense the bare radio interface down to a module the size of a small USB wifi interface, standardize the form factor, and let consumers buy any pocket computer they like and just stick the radio module from the relevant company into it without interference from the carriers.
> You want to be choosing between thousands of different phones? You're mad.
You mean, like choosing between thousands of permutations of CPUs, motherboards, hard drives (or SSDs), cooling systems, RAM timing, and videocards? Yes.
When you have 10 choices, they get locked down and have to be hacked by their owners to do what WE want instead of what the carriers want them to do.
When you have a thousand choices, you can have a few crushingly-locked-down phones for the unwashed masses that make the carriers happy (the Apple universe), a few equally locked-down phones that pretend to be open, but generally exist to make the other carriers happy (Android), and several hundred whose makers don't even bother to lock them down because they know it's futile, will just piss off their buyers, and because they themselves just grabbed a copy of Android from the AOSP repository a few weeks earlier.
The carriers want neat, walled gardens where a half-dozen neutered flowers surrounded by barbed wire will bloom on schedule in a predictable and orderly manner. They hate the idea that something unpredictable and disruptive might suddenly appear, become popular, and scramble their Five Year Plan in a way that makes the final 4 years of it completely obsolete almost overnight.
Screw walled gardens and closed, locked-down hardware that consumers never get to truly own. Let a thousand flowers bloom. ;-)
Because in the mid-90s, GSM didn't exist, and CDMA was utterly and completely superior to GSM's core legacy technology (TDMA) in every meaningful way -- efficiency, robustness, call quality, the works. Sprint was the first company to own nationwide spectrum and build a brand new network from the ground up. Since they had no legacy baggage, and no need to interoperate with anyone, there was no reason for them to NOT go with CDMA. Verizon was originally a fairly small regional carrier that grew by acquiring lots of other regional carriers. It went with CDMA for the same reason as Sprint -- if you're building a brand new network with no legacy baggage CDMA was just plain better.
Believe it or not, *AT&T* almost switched to CDMA around 2002 or 2003. They realized TDMA was a dead end and were about to shut down their analog network, and it came down to GSM or CDMA. The only reason they went with GSM was because their merger with Cingular was approved, and Cingular had already committed to GSM.
For the record, CDMA has always supported an extension to SIM cards to achieve the exact same purpose. The problem is that Qualcomm allowed Sprint and Verizon to solder the chips into the phone instead of make them removable cards, and Sprint & Verizon did precisely that just because they could. Go to other countries that use CDMA, and the CDMA phones there are every bit as interoperable as GSM phones are in Europe.