Users who generate a lot of page views are rewarded.
This encourages users to create more and hopefully "better" (in terms of interest to their audience) posts.
In turn this draws more page views and makes Facebook more money.
Actually if Facebook was wise they would simply give you a private ranking on your post, how many views a picture or wall post garnered to encourage you to do more.
Facebook users love collecting things: friends, likes, Farmville items...give them another virtual currency: views!
One can understand Facebook's problem. Too many people use it. Too many posts are being created. Too many people miss most of what's there. Yes, it's just like Twitter.
If Facebook's layout did not stink this would not be an issue.
If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything.
Instead I get this seemingly random arrangement of things on the main page and it takes me two clicks to even bring up a complete friend list which is arranged in no useful order.
I cannot wait for the day when we look back on Facebook like we did on proprietary email protocols and instant messaging protocols and have a beautiful selection of clients.
I am still looking forward to the day when all those services are easily host on servers that are not harvesting the average user's data...
I bet people would pay $10/day for that feature.
Who searched for me, who viewed my profile, what part of my profile did they view?
To bad we are locked in to a proprietary social network that hides such information from the user...
Yes that would arguably kill the social networking site since people would be to paranoid to stalk...oh wait no it would not.
Instead of up skirt shots, it was a bunch of pictures of ankles peaking out from underneath their burkas.
No lie I saw it on the discovery channel that Arab men love when they catch a little glimpse of ankle...scandalous.
Do religious food restrictions cover licking things, because if you are actually consuming something during oral sex you might be doing it wrong?
You can sell your Steam account, although I would not let Steam know you are doing so... I open a new account for each game I buy, that way I can sell them off one buy one.
Understood, sorry to press you, I though they had out right said that MeeGo was not to be touched any longer and I missed it.
I have read a few things here and there that Nokia is very polarized internally with different factions competing and almost opposing each other on developmental direction and decisions; but I am not sure how reliable that info is.
The N9 just got a MeeGo update at the end of February, so someone at Nokia is still working on it...maybe, I am still hoping?
Perhaps it is hiding under Meltemi, which unfortunately means weaker hardware, but hey the N8 had a great camera.
I guess Intel is our best hope now for Tizen, although an x86 based smartphone still just feels wrong.
I did not know the Microsoft deal had the precondition to dump Meego/Tizen, I figured it just had the precondition to produce a WP7 phone.
But I do not think the rumors of two new Nokia MeeGo phones would persist at all if Nokia had the precondition to dump Meego; although it appears the rumored phones will at best have the MeeGo GUI and run S40.
A little Google searching on the topic does not reveal any such agreement to abandon Meego, at most Nokia agreed to make Windows Phone its primary platform, do you have a sources to clarify that Nokia has to kill all in house MeeGo development? I hope I have not missed something:
paidCOntent,
Telegraph,
CNet,
The Next Web,
Microsoft.
But I am sure that it is wishful thinking to think that Nokia will drop Windows Phone and get back behind MeeGo in full force any time soon, if ever...
My understanding was that the commercial was saying that other phones, the current ones on the market such as the iPhone and Android mobiles, were so distracting you would not see your beautiful wife in a nighty. On the other hand Windows Phone is so slick it allows you to be present and live life, it just fits in seamlessly, not as a distraction. Here check out the commercial. The problem is I think most of use want to live life on our phone and be distracted from reality...great marketing missed the mark and did nothing to further the brand. In case you did not see the Dr. Spaceman Beta Test commercial.
Two aspects of Nokia hardware have always appealed to me.
Foremost Nokia's use of Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, unfortunately the Luima and the N9 did not seem to fair as well as the N8.
Second Nokia's support for penta-band GSM HSPA which until the Galaxy Nexus was hard to come by in Android hardware.
Admittedly the Lumia hardware is a bit underwhelming compared to what Nokia was turning out a year ago.
Sadly the N9 was a little late and they never let the N950 out to the public.
But I suspect that Nokia could easily catch up with the latest quad core gig a ram hd screen super phone with a little Carl Zeiss icing and multi-band LTE support for the win.
Before Android my experience with Nokia handsets was much more positive than say Samsung or Motorola, the hardware was a little bit more open to my tampering. Samsung and Motorola charged for software to interface with there phones or locked them down, while Nokia provided PC interface software free and did not limit things like uploading MIDlets over bluetooth. Nokia was the first handset I saw with VoIP/SIP support. For a while the N900 was in the news every week running something new, meanwhile we are still fighting Motorola for an unlocked bootloader.
Overall, Nokia seemed to buck the US carriers a bit, unfortunately probably why they lost shelf space here in the states.
From what I have seen I like Nokia politics and innovation.
I would rather Nokia get my money over other manufactures whose every move seems anti-consumer.
Although Sammy has been a lot better as of late, HTC is not bad either, and hopefully Google can beat Moto Mobility into shape.
But ultimately I would love to see another open player in the smartphone OS market, and Android seemed like a much better transition to Meego/Tizen.
...but is ultimately a false choice. You can't have android on the Lumia because it doesn't exist that way. [It] is like saying, [the] iPhone would be better with android on it.
Why can't I? The Nokia N900 and N9 both have Android ported to them, I see no reason the Lumia could not be blessed in the same way.
Android has been ported to the iPhone as well, and there are groups working on porting it to the latest iPhone hardware.
I would have loved to have the iPhone 4 hardware back two years ago with that 960x640 screen running Android, it would have been better.
I am not sure how stable the ports are, but it is not a false choice, it is a choice that Nokia made and operators are saying it was a bad choice, fix it.
Nokia Anssi Vanjoki said something to the effect of adopting Android is like Finish boys who "pee in their pants" for warmth in the winter.
Well it seems Windows Phone is like taking some money on a dare from another Finish boy for defecating in your pants...
The bet thing ms / Nokia can do right now is take their lumps, invest in advertising, and have faith that they have a great product on the shelf. Build it and people will come.
The Windows Phone advertisements have been great. I loved the one with the people so distracted by their phones, especially the chick in the black nighty.
Even better is the latest one with Dr. Spaceman telling everyone their previous smartphone was a beta.
The advertising is very clever, the problem is the Windows brand is tarnished, who wants a phone running Windows? Everyone loathes Windows.
On the other hand the iPhone and Android advertising campaigns are fairly blah, but the brands are hot. Everyone wants Apple and knows what the iPhone is. Everyone also knows there is something they call "Droid" despite that being the Verizon brand. If you do not want an iPhone, you get a "Droid" phone, those are the cool ones.
Microsoft should have used the xBox brand, brought out the Phone-X or Mobile-X or something cool. Windows branding was just a bad choice.
As you said we know Microsoft can continue to dump tons of money into Windows Phone.
Android despite being superior seems poised to piss all over itself with confusing hardware releases and crippling skins.
Steve is dead and Apple seems poised to follow.
I am praying Nokia will wipe itself, leverage the Microsoft funds, and use MeeGo excrete some other bodily fluid on the competition.
I came hear to complain about the same thing. I have had little luck with Android phone recording apps. If they sold this Trojan in the Android Market, I mean Google Play, they could make some mad cash!
We need Tim to take it a step further and force Sprint and Verizon to allow all CDMA capable iPhones on their networks. Hell I would even set aside my Android phone and buy an iPhone to support that!
I'd say that for the US market, SIM cards do the exact opposite of protecting carriers.
When I say that a SIM card only protects the carrier, I am mean in contrast to a Soft-SIM solution. Note that there is no Soft-SIM solution implemented.
A Soft-SIM solution would allow any carrier to give a user Soft-SIM info to register the user, the user then enters the data in their phone of choice, same level playing field currently in the world.
A hardware SIM is very hard to hack, hiding and processing the user keys in hardware out of reach of the phone software or hardware.
However, for the US model, where phones are bundled w/ the services, I don't get why anybody - AT&T, T-Mobile are GSM at all!
GSM is technically superior to CDMA, so in the aim to maximize spectrum AT&T/T-Mobile chose GSM over CDMA, Verizon and Sprint were just early adopters of digital tech and locked in to CDMA.
It makes more sense for a Verizon or Sprint to sell a SIM-less phone to a customer, and when that customer switches, the phone is automatically worthless.
Carriers make money of service, they generally are selling the phone hardware at a lose to entice customers into 2 year commitments.
Verizon seems to reject Sprint hardware in order to entice new customers to buy a new phone and lock into a contract.
However it seems to me that Verizon would be wiser to accept Sprint hardware and lure the customer into contract with some lower monthly rate that is still profitable to them.
Let us say Verizon was a GSM carrier today, what stops Verizon from white-listing IMEI numbers?
Heck we do not have to imagine, what if I brought a non Verizon LTE device with 700 MHz Class 13 support to Verizon?
There LTE phones have SIM cards, can I use the foreign device device on Verizon's network?
Everything I have read says no, Verizon still blocks non Verizon devices, but I am still looking for verification.
If that is true, then the whole premise of SIM cards freeing us goes right out the window.
The more perplexing question is why does AT&T not white-list IMEI numbers, they even refuse to even blacklist the IMEI numbers of stolen devices: US Mobile Carriers Won't Brick Stolen Phones.
Is it because they understand that the more devices, the more customers who will buy service?
Is AT&T perhaps less evil than Verizon somehow?
SIM cards simply protect the carriers, but making authentication to their networks tied into protected hardware.
I see no advantages to end users that a software SIM would not trump a dozen times over.
SIM cards are the devil, give us soft-SIM tech already, then we can have thinner phones!
Like everyone else who watch Star Trek The Next Generation, I have been dreaming about touch screen interfaces since the late 80s.
Now that they are here...it was not worth the wait.
I downloaded BlueStacks yesterday, installed my favorite Android games, and they are ten times better with a mouse!
My fingers do not get in the way!
Now if I only had a dual mice pointer I could do multi-touch
I admit there is something innately pleasurable about a touch screen and feeling you are really interacting directly with the items on screen, but in the end it is mostly imprecise and frustrating.
Sure some advances have been made allowing it to be tolerable, but occlusion of the screen by your fingers and the lack of tactile feedback mess it all up by design.
As a result the iPhone has made it harder than ever to make a phone call and only slightly less frustrating to send text messages compared to a feature phone given that we used to have physical keyboards with a Blackberry.
Touchscreens have their place and uses, they are not going away; but I look forward to the day we get our buttons back.
Case in point is the Kindle Fire, who thought it was a good idea to exclude the external volume buttons?
I am with chrismcb on this one, gesture computing only works really well in imaginary worlds like Minority Report.
I mean why steal a concept from a movie that does not even properly justify the main character ripping his eye balls out?
The real future is EEG and muscle computer control and muscle/nerve sensing control.
Why bother making the gesture, when I can just think it?
SIM cards get around that... They still sell phones that are "locked", but they can be unlocked. Once a phone is unlocked, it can be used with any carrier, when you put the SIM in.
*that* is why we're using SIM cards.
The Verizon Droid 2 Global proves that SIM cards do not get around that.
The Droid 2 Global has a GSM radio technically compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile GSM networks in the US.
However, upon unlocking the Droid 2 Global SIM card it will still not work on American GSM networks.
Some claim that altering the radio firmware allowed the Droid 2 Global to jump on US GSM networks, but I have never found an exploit available.
I always wondered if CDMA phones from say Sprint and Verizon could technically cross carriers. What is stopping them?
I can understand carriers locking their phones or excluding frequency bands to deter you from taking them to another carrier.
But I am not convinced that Verizon/Sprint decided it wanted to force you to use a Verizon/Sprint phone instead of luring you over to their network without the extra cost of a new phone.
I suspect Verizon CDMA phones just are not setup to connect to Sprint CDMA towers, just like the Droid 2 Global is carrier blocked in the firmware.
Sprint/Verizon probably do not want to mess with trying to flash competitors firmware to their own network.
If CDMA authentication is anything like GSM authentication, then Sprint needs to have some info that only Verizon has about the keys in the Verizon phone and vice versa.
However, I have heard of some of the smaller CDMA carriers activating Verizon phones on their networks, but I always suspect it was because they were just reselling connections to Verizon towers anyway.
If the carrier got in league with each other, then why did T-Mobile and AT&T not get in on it?
My understanding is that GSM networks could use IMEI white lists just the same as CDMA networks use ESN white lists.
Of course SIM card locking and excluding frequencies is fairly effective. But why not go a step further like the Droid 2 Global and exclude specific carriers?
Perhaps AT&T is just not as evil as Verizon?
Slashdot Mirror
I like this idea!
Users who generate a lot of page views are rewarded.
This encourages users to create more and hopefully "better" (in terms of interest to their audience) posts.
In turn this draws more page views and makes Facebook more money.
Actually if Facebook was wise they would simply give you a private ranking on your post, how many views a picture or wall post garnered to encourage you to do more.
Facebook users love collecting things: friends, likes, Farmville items...give them another virtual currency: views!
One can understand Facebook's problem. Too many people use it. Too many posts are being created. Too many people miss most of what's there. Yes, it's just like Twitter.
If Facebook's layout did not stink this would not be an issue.
If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything.
Instead I get this seemingly random arrangement of things on the main page and it takes me two clicks to even bring up a complete friend list which is arranged in no useful order.
I cannot wait for the day when we look back on Facebook like we did on proprietary email protocols and instant messaging protocols and have a beautiful selection of clients.
I am still looking forward to the day when all those services are easily host on servers that are not harvesting the average user's data...
I bet people would pay $10/day for that feature.
Who searched for me, who viewed my profile, what part of my profile did they view?
To bad we are locked in to a proprietary social network that hides such information from the user...
Yes that would arguably kill the social networking site since people would be to paranoid to stalk...oh wait no it would not.
Bachelor's degree == the new high school diploma?
Instead of up skirt shots, it was a bunch of pictures of ankles peaking out from underneath their burkas.
No lie I saw it on the discovery channel that Arab men love when they catch a little glimpse of ankle...scandalous.
Do religious food restrictions cover licking things, because if you are actually consuming something during oral sex you might be doing it wrong?
When I offer a Steam game/account on a forum or craigslist I do not post the steam ID or anything that can identify the account.
The only way Steam can get the info they need to ban the account, is to buy it from me.
If Steam wants to pay me and then ban the account, well it is their account they can do whatever they want with it...
My dog accepts all EULA/TOS, not me, Steam can sue him if they want.
You can sell your Steam account, although I would not let Steam know you are doing so... I open a new account for each game I buy, that way I can sell them off one buy one.
Understood, sorry to press you, I though they had out right said that MeeGo was not to be touched any longer and I missed it.
I have read a few things here and there that Nokia is very polarized internally with different factions competing and almost opposing each other on developmental direction and decisions; but I am not sure how reliable that info is.
The N9 just got a MeeGo update at the end of February, so someone at Nokia is still working on it...maybe, I am still hoping?
Perhaps it is hiding under Meltemi, which unfortunately means weaker hardware, but hey the N8 had a great camera.
I guess Intel is our best hope now for Tizen, although an x86 based smartphone still just feels wrong.
No inside info here sorry.
I did not know the Microsoft deal had the precondition to dump Meego/Tizen, I figured it just had the precondition to produce a WP7 phone.
But I do not think the rumors of two new Nokia MeeGo phones would persist at all if Nokia had the precondition to dump Meego; although it appears the rumored phones will at best have the MeeGo GUI and run S40.
A little Google searching on the topic does not reveal any such agreement to abandon Meego, at most Nokia agreed to make Windows Phone its primary platform, do you have a sources to clarify that Nokia has to kill all in house MeeGo development? I hope I have not missed something: paidCOntent, Telegraph, CNet, The Next Web, Microsoft.
But I am sure that it is wishful thinking to think that Nokia will drop Windows Phone and get back behind MeeGo in full force any time soon, if ever...
No you misunderstand, I am cheering for Nokia to leverage the money Microsoft gave them into getting Meego/Tizen off the ground.
My understanding was that the commercial was saying that other phones, the current ones on the market such as the iPhone and Android mobiles, were so distracting you would not see your beautiful wife in a nighty. On the other hand Windows Phone is so slick it allows you to be present and live life, it just fits in seamlessly, not as a distraction. Here check out the commercial. The problem is I think most of use want to live life on our phone and be distracted from reality...great marketing missed the mark and did nothing to further the brand. In case you did not see the Dr. Spaceman Beta Test commercial.
Nokia has often been praised for its hardware.
Two aspects of Nokia hardware have always appealed to me.
Foremost Nokia's use of Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, unfortunately the Luima and the N9 did not seem to fair as well as the N8.
Second Nokia's support for penta-band GSM HSPA which until the Galaxy Nexus was hard to come by in Android hardware.
Admittedly the Lumia hardware is a bit underwhelming compared to what Nokia was turning out a year ago.
Sadly the N9 was a little late and they never let the N950 out to the public.
But I suspect that Nokia could easily catch up with the latest quad core gig a ram hd screen super phone with a little Carl Zeiss icing and multi-band LTE support for the win.
Before Android my experience with Nokia handsets was much more positive than say Samsung or Motorola, the hardware was a little bit more open to my tampering. Samsung and Motorola charged for software to interface with there phones or locked them down, while Nokia provided PC interface software free and did not limit things like uploading MIDlets over bluetooth. Nokia was the first handset I saw with VoIP/SIP support. For a while the N900 was in the news every week running something new, meanwhile we are still fighting Motorola for an unlocked bootloader.
Overall, Nokia seemed to buck the US carriers a bit, unfortunately probably why they lost shelf space here in the states.
From what I have seen I like Nokia politics and innovation.
I would rather Nokia get my money over other manufactures whose every move seems anti-consumer.
Although Sammy has been a lot better as of late, HTC is not bad either, and hopefully Google can beat Moto Mobility into shape.
But ultimately I would love to see another open player in the smartphone OS market, and Android seemed like a much better transition to Meego/Tizen.
...but is ultimately a false choice. You can't have android on the Lumia because it doesn't exist that way. [It] is like saying, [the] iPhone would be better with android on it.
Why can't I? The Nokia N900 and N9 both have Android ported to them, I see no reason the Lumia could not be blessed in the same way.
Android has been ported to the iPhone as well, and there are groups working on porting it to the latest iPhone hardware.
I would have loved to have the iPhone 4 hardware back two years ago with that 960x640 screen running Android, it would have been better.
I am not sure how stable the ports are, but it is not a false choice, it is a choice that Nokia made and operators are saying it was a bad choice, fix it.
Nokia Anssi Vanjoki said something to the effect of adopting Android is like Finish boys who "pee in their pants" for warmth in the winter.
Well it seems Windows Phone is like taking some money on a dare from another Finish boy for defecating in your pants...
The bet thing ms / Nokia can do right now is take their lumps, invest in advertising, and have faith that they have a great product on the shelf. Build it and people will come.
The Windows Phone advertisements have been great. I loved the one with the people so distracted by their phones, especially the chick in the black nighty.
Even better is the latest one with Dr. Spaceman telling everyone their previous smartphone was a beta.
The advertising is very clever, the problem is the Windows brand is tarnished, who wants a phone running Windows? Everyone loathes Windows.
On the other hand the iPhone and Android advertising campaigns are fairly blah, but the brands are hot. Everyone wants Apple and knows what the iPhone is. Everyone also knows there is something they call "Droid" despite that being the Verizon brand. If you do not want an iPhone, you get a "Droid" phone, those are the cool ones.
Microsoft should have used the xBox brand, brought out the Phone-X or Mobile-X or something cool. Windows branding was just a bad choice.
As you said we know Microsoft can continue to dump tons of money into Windows Phone.
Android despite being superior seems poised to piss all over itself with confusing hardware releases and crippling skins.
Steve is dead and Apple seems poised to follow.
I am praying Nokia will wipe itself, leverage the Microsoft funds, and use MeeGo excrete some other bodily fluid on the competition.
All the need to do is make the Android "tiles" into widgets, then they can be dynamic.
I came hear to complain about the same thing. I have had little luck with Android phone recording apps. If they sold this Trojan in the Android Market, I mean Google Play, they could make some mad cash!
We need Tim to take it a step further and force Sprint and Verizon to allow all CDMA capable iPhones on their networks. Hell I would even set aside my Android phone and buy an iPhone to support that!
All voice communication should be handled over a data connect and handed off to WiFi when available...
Are there proposed, possibly superior, alternatives today to tower-node communication?
I'd say that for the US market, SIM cards do the exact opposite of protecting carriers.
When I say that a SIM card only protects the carrier, I am mean in contrast to a Soft-SIM solution. Note that there is no Soft-SIM solution implemented.
A Soft-SIM solution would allow any carrier to give a user Soft-SIM info to register the user, the user then enters the data in their phone of choice, same level playing field currently in the world.
A hardware SIM is very hard to hack, hiding and processing the user keys in hardware out of reach of the phone software or hardware.
However, for the US model, where phones are bundled w/ the services, I don't get why anybody - AT&T, T-Mobile are GSM at all!
GSM is technically superior to CDMA, so in the aim to maximize spectrum AT&T/T-Mobile chose GSM over CDMA, Verizon and Sprint were just early adopters of digital tech and locked in to CDMA.
It makes more sense for a Verizon or Sprint to sell a SIM-less phone to a customer, and when that customer switches, the phone is automatically worthless.
Carriers make money of service, they generally are selling the phone hardware at a lose to entice customers into 2 year commitments.
Verizon seems to reject Sprint hardware in order to entice new customers to buy a new phone and lock into a contract.
However it seems to me that Verizon would be wiser to accept Sprint hardware and lure the customer into contract with some lower monthly rate that is still profitable to them.
Let us say Verizon was a GSM carrier today, what stops Verizon from white-listing IMEI numbers?
Heck we do not have to imagine, what if I brought a non Verizon LTE device with 700 MHz Class 13 support to Verizon?
There LTE phones have SIM cards, can I use the foreign device device on Verizon's network?
Everything I have read says no, Verizon still blocks non Verizon devices, but I am still looking for verification.
If that is true, then the whole premise of SIM cards freeing us goes right out the window.
The more perplexing question is why does AT&T not white-list IMEI numbers, they even refuse to even blacklist the IMEI numbers of stolen devices: US Mobile Carriers Won't Brick Stolen Phones.
Is it because they understand that the more devices, the more customers who will buy service?
Is AT&T perhaps less evil than Verizon somehow?
SIM cards simply protect the carriers, but making authentication to their networks tied into protected hardware.
I see no advantages to end users that a software SIM would not trump a dozen times over.
SIM cards are the devil, give us soft-SIM tech already, then we can have thinner phones!
Like everyone else who watch Star Trek The Next Generation, I have been dreaming about touch screen interfaces since the late 80s.
Now that they are here...it was not worth the wait.
I downloaded BlueStacks yesterday, installed my favorite Android games, and they are ten times better with a mouse!
My fingers do not get in the way!
Now if I only had a dual mice pointer I could do multi-touch
I admit there is something innately pleasurable about a touch screen and feeling you are really interacting directly with the items on screen, but in the end it is mostly imprecise and frustrating.
Sure some advances have been made allowing it to be tolerable, but occlusion of the screen by your fingers and the lack of tactile feedback mess it all up by design.
As a result the iPhone has made it harder than ever to make a phone call and only slightly less frustrating to send text messages compared to a feature phone given that we used to have physical keyboards with a Blackberry.
Touchscreens have their place and uses, they are not going away; but I look forward to the day we get our buttons back.
Case in point is the Kindle Fire, who thought it was a good idea to exclude the external volume buttons?
I am with chrismcb on this one, gesture computing only works really well in imaginary worlds like Minority Report.
I mean why steal a concept from a movie that does not even properly justify the main character ripping his eye balls out? The real future is EEG and muscle computer control and muscle/nerve sensing control.
Why bother making the gesture, when I can just think it?
Shortage of tickets to google I/O and shortage of raspberry pi boards now equals food/clothing/housing shortages.
SIM cards get around that... They still sell phones that are "locked", but they can be unlocked. Once a phone is unlocked, it can be used with any carrier, when you put the SIM in.
*that* is why we're using SIM cards.
The Verizon Droid 2 Global proves that SIM cards do not get around that.
The Droid 2 Global has a GSM radio technically compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile GSM networks in the US.
However, upon unlocking the Droid 2 Global SIM card it will still not work on American GSM networks.
Some claim that altering the radio firmware allowed the Droid 2 Global to jump on US GSM networks, but I have never found an exploit available.
I always wondered if CDMA phones from say Sprint and Verizon could technically cross carriers. What is stopping them?
I can understand carriers locking their phones or excluding frequency bands to deter you from taking them to another carrier.
But I am not convinced that Verizon/Sprint decided it wanted to force you to use a Verizon/Sprint phone instead of luring you over to their network without the extra cost of a new phone.
I suspect Verizon CDMA phones just are not setup to connect to Sprint CDMA towers, just like the Droid 2 Global is carrier blocked in the firmware.
Sprint/Verizon probably do not want to mess with trying to flash competitors firmware to their own network.
If CDMA authentication is anything like GSM authentication, then Sprint needs to have some info that only Verizon has about the keys in the Verizon phone and vice versa.
However, I have heard of some of the smaller CDMA carriers activating Verizon phones on their networks, but I always suspect it was because they were just reselling connections to Verizon towers anyway.
If the carrier got in league with each other, then why did T-Mobile and AT&T not get in on it?
My understanding is that GSM networks could use IMEI white lists just the same as CDMA networks use ESN white lists.
Of course SIM card locking and excluding frequencies is fairly effective. But why not go a step further like the Droid 2 Global and exclude specific carriers?
Perhaps AT&T is just not as evil as Verizon?
Now it is like I am playing in Matrix time and I rock!
Call them on what, my leather wallet?