They had Word/Excel/PowerPoint on phones for seven or so years. It wasn't a hit because people will, at most, just use them to view existing documents, and you could have done that on a BlackBerry and gotten a better device in every way.
People don't edit and create content on phones, by and large, or at least not the kind of content that's authored in Microsoft Word: Lobotomized Edition.
And this is the problem: no one cared that you could run Word or Excel on a smartphone. Heck, people barely cared that you could hack your Win32 code to run on WinCE that cost as much as a PC and ran a quarter as well. The Windows/Office ecosystem the extended neatly across desktops and servers doesn't work on phones.
Microsoft, to their credit, finally got this in WP7. The question is: why choose WP7 over anything else? I mean, the only reason WM sold at all was that it had captive vertical-market buyers who needed to run Windows apps, or that it was free with your contract. For WP7, and in the era of Android, that isn't the case.
Many people, especially many upper-level executives, consider the need to boot up into Windows (or Linux, or Mac OS X) and use full, heavy-weight applications to do simple things like reading mail as something they really, really care about.
The Slate is a very different device, and, equipped with Windows, it's going down the same rabbit-hole HP went down already---without success---with the tc1000. People who want a full PC usually don't want a tablet's compromised input devices, and people who want a tablet don't want a desktop OS and it's baggage.
You used a tc1000? You have my sympathy. That thing was awful: the Transmeta CPU was slow as molasses in January, the WiFi reception poor, bits would break off of it at a whim (I lost locking tabs for the battery and keyboard in a month) and XP tablet was just wretched. Going through digitizer tips was just the icing on the cake. And it was the best of it's era.
I think I used the USB ports only a handful of times (and the CF slot and VGA port never), and the stylus I gave up on as it was faster to use the hardware keyboard, what with the digitizing delay and Newton-esque misspellings.
When I saw the iPad, I was fully prepared for it to be the contemporary tc1000. Only, instead of building a device to spec (must have USB ports, must have flash card slot, must run Windows, must be dockable into a full PC, must have removeable battery) it was built to an experience (must not suck to use). I know a lot of people call this the "Ooh, shiny!" factor, but it really is much more than that: the device works, and does so in a consistent and pleasing manner because it was designed to meet an expectation of usability, rather than some geek's wishlist marketing exec's bullet-point spec sheet. It took my days to find something about the iPad that pissed me off; it took minutes to do that on the tc1000.
Better yet, the upper-management types for whom the iPad really works well for haven't found anything that pisses them off. I can tell you that certainly wasn't the case with the tc1000, whose out-of-box experience scuttled a further deployment.
The iPad works really well as a device on which you primarily view content, mildly interact with it, and rarely create it. It's a great replacement for a Blackberry for people who deal with attachments (such as the aforementioned Veeps who read emails and view Excel and PowerPoint docs created by others and get frustrated trying to use a BB and do better with a simple phone). It's a good tool (once wrapped in a tough case) for service technicians and drivers/delivery personnel, assuming your data collection applications are well-designed. It absolutely is the wrong tool for spreadsheet jockeys, order-entry clerks and probably not great for most IT people (for whom it's, at best a complementary tool). In a corporate deployment you have to consider the experience of the user, and this is why the tc1000 (and it's ilk) failed: it wasn't designed for a specific experience, and ended up being a jack-of-no-trades-master-of-nothing.
I don't think you'll ever (for a given value of "ever") see a device that can take decent notes. Note-taking (and voice transcription) is one of those things that computers universally suck at, and that pen-and-paper do quite well. If you're dependent on written input, any technology is going to feel like a solution in search of a problem.
No, it doesn't. I owned an E71 and N86 (both newer than your E61) and, quite honestly, both do a pathetic job of web browsing and a slightly-less-than-pathetic job at handling email. Yes, it doesn't do IMAP idle, but Nokia didn't reach something remotely resembling parity on the email front until Messaging was released, and even then it's a glitchy bugger of an app. Web browsing remains just as bad as ever.
If you can't see what the iPhone offered versus S60, well, then, I don't know what to say.
So Steve Jobs comes along, releases a device that, at launch, was inferior to Nokia's offerings, and was saddled by an outdated network
Well, there was the little issue of, you know, the user interface. The iPhone did show you what you could do with your phone, and it did it by not being completely irritating to use the way Symbian, Windows Mobile or BBOS were. Sure, it didn't have a 8 megapixel camera, or a hardware keyboard, or better-than-EDGE networking. But it turns out that people didn't really want those things: they wanted a phone that didn't suck to use.
I remember when the iPhone came out. I was working with Windows Mobile devices, mostly, at the time but did have some experience with Symbian and used a BB day-in-day-out and Apple's device didn't just move the goalposts on user experience, it changed the game. RIM you can excuse because they never pretended to make anything other than a perfect email device, but Microsoft and Nokia were either shamelessly arrogant or grossly incompetent in sticking with their completely-broken systems for so long.
I remember getting a new N86 8MP new when I dunked my E71. Compared to my partner's first-gen iPhone it was better in every way, except when it came to actually using it, and that was years after the iPhone debuted. Someone at Nokia should have figured that out the day Apple's device came out because there was no excuse for the N86 or N97 sucking as badly as they did. And no, the half-baked, orphaned-at-launch N900 was not the answer.
And there's no "huge political agenda" opposing global warming? No entrenched mulit-billion dollar industries with long and deep ties to governments? Really?
Please. There's a few billion, if that, involved in pro-AGCC benefactors. There's trillions of dollars on the other side of the aisle.
Heck, they've retrenched their position several times now. Back when "skepticism" was the default and climate science was fighting to be heard, it used to be "Is it even happening?" and changed to "Well, it happening, but it's not people's fault". Now--especially that actions are being taken---the dialogue has gotten particularly shrill and it's either "Well, how can we trust the scientists when there's 'differences of opinion'" or "It's a conspiracy!". And while I'm sure that there's a few genuine skeptics out there, the bulk of the argument is carried by people better described as "denialists" who aren't skeptical of the science but do have a vested ideological or financial issue with changing our consumption patterns.
Very few "skeptics" don't think it's happening and are generally arguing about degree and detail. Denialists are taking that disagreement in much the same way Creationists take debate about the details of how evolution works and proxy it into "Not even the scientists are certain, so how can we be sure it's happening at all?"
Let's be honest, here. Nokia shipped almost half a billion bottom-feeder, cheap-as-it-gets third-world specials. What few smartphones they do sell are barely smart, have effectively no app development community, and exist solely as "the cheapest option" among the smartphones available, and that market is getting slowly eaten away by a hundred cheap Android devices.
Nokia's "commanding lead in marketshare" is worthless. This move more or less confirms that; if it wasn't, they wouldn't need Microsoft's "help".
If everyone jumps onboard the OS is going to dominate the market
This assumes the PC market functions the same way as the cellphone market. That doesn't seem to be the case: the user expertise is generally lower, web (and web-based/derived) interfaces and modern development environments lower the barriers to cross-platform development and intraplatform fragmentation is a much larger problem (especially on Android), the device's useful lifetime is shorter and the cost to the consumer much lower.
Android could be the largest player in the market, but it will never dominate it the way Windows has dominated the PC market because it's a fundamentally different market.
What? That's crazy talk. No, that's worse, it's socialism!, just like trusting the government provide health care, pensions or a basic necessities like food or shelter.
Note that this is entirely different from trusting the government with an arsenal of weapons and tens of thousands of people under arms. That's perfectly ok.
The problem isn't that they don't have a plan, it's that they have about five or six different plans, all half-baked, self-competing and receiving of little attention. The above comparison to General Motors is very apt.
Nokia's smartphones don't matter. They sell a lot of handsets, but those handsets see little or no app development and contribute, per unit, very little margin. They're number one, but in an irrelevant way.
And I say this as a past owner of several handsets and an erstwhile fan. Nokia has no PC-side leverage like Microsoft, lacks the enterprise management tools that BlackBerry does, and has nothing like the developer momentum of Android or iOS. The phones and the core functionality are solid, but the UI is still clunky (as of Symbian^3), the applications often buggy or sub-par, the developer direction highly unclear (so is it Symbian this week? Maemo/Meego/Waytogo? Are we still pushing Ovi?) and so forth.
They've taken too long and frittered away too much opportunity, much like Motorola did before them. Mark my words, they're going to end up a maker of cheap, commodity phones, competing with LG and Samsung's low-ball offerings for the free-with-your-plan subscription. Or rather, they will until they start spinning off business units left, right and centre.
No, but most, if not all, of the major patent holders are part of MPEG-LA.
It's not FUD, by the way. For a large organization who might license WebM or produce content encoded with WebM/VP8 it's a serious issue. Google is not doing the format any favours by letting it's largest potential users assume serious risk.
I don't like it any more than you do, but putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "FUD!" won't make the problem go away.
If Google is serious---really serious---about WebM from the perspective of software freedom, then they need to do two things: one, they need to make the format an open, vendor-independent standard and two, they need to show they have some skin in the game and indemnify their customers and users.
WebM is good news imo since it will have Google's pockets behind it
Google will not indemnify you against infringement suits. Anyone who chooses to use WebM is actually at more of a risk than someone choosing to use H.264 in that respect.
There's some things like like about WebM, but Google's altruism isn't one of them. They're in this for themselves.
It's not a matter of privilege, it's a matter of technology and cost. Why should a commercial developer devote resources to supporting hardware that has long since made them any money and whose support probably diverts resources from new initiatives.
Time and technology marches on, and if you can't afford, say, an hundred-dollar Atom desktop that could play h.264 then, well, it's unfortunate. It's not like Apple or Microsoft or even Canonical built a kill-switch into their software, it's that you can't reasonably expect a developers to waste tens or hundreds of man-hours trying to shoehorn capability into a 10+ year old machine. There's a point of declining returns in play.
Should we support 286s still? ST506 drives? CGA adapters?
Or do you mean we could hold back video on the internet to appeal to people with ten-year old hardware. How would we force content providers to downsample everything to 172x144 15fps Sorenson or MPEG1? I'm a dyed in the wool socialist and even I think that's an impractical thing to do.
He could mean, say, the iPod Touch, and it is a valid concern: there are a lot of devices like it, devices that support hardware-accelerated h.264 but might not ever see an update for WebM. Even if Android ends up ruling the world, there's still years worth of sales of other devices to deal with.
I don't think people appreciate how embedded h.264 is. It's the primary codec for Flash, for BluRay, for DivX/Xvid. It's in phones, tablets, embedded devices, etc. I'd feel better if Google was doing this for altruistic reasons, but they're not fully opening WebM, nor are they offering patent indemnification. Nor is WebM demonstrably better than h.264. Google has Youtube in it's favour, but that's really about it. I don't believe you can even get hardware-accelerated WebM in new Android devices, let alone upgrade older ones.
Meanwhile, h.264's licensing terms are well known, understood and not completely unreasonable, and it's more or less guaranteed to play on a whole bunch of extant devices.
A 400MHz G4... Let's see... That's something like my G4 Cube, which was release in 2000.
Yeah. Apple's restrictions are all that's keeping you from running a modern browser and OS on a ten year old machine. I seriously suggest you try running Chrome 9, Firefox 4 or IE9 under Win7 or Ubuntu 10.04 a P2-400 with 256 to 512MB RAM. While you're at it, try to play back an HTML5 video streamed from the web.. Let us know how it goes.
Apple is just codifying what is, for intents and purposes, a functional limitation. If I were them, I wouldn't waste resources trying to support ten-year old hardware, either. It's nice that, eg, you can run an XFCE-based desktop under Linux on that kind of hardware and perform basic tasks, but you're still up against the "Try and run a modern browser and play back H.264 or WebM video" restriction.
It implies a collapse of a free and civil society for the same reason that universal health care, sane drug laws and a tax structure not best described as Byzantine does: Americans are terrified of their government but have no problem with oligarchs having their way with them. This situation suits the upper class just fine---they get to keep society's eyes off their own goings-on by fingering government at every occasion.
Despite the rest of the western world providing a working counterexample, many American citizens still think it's 1776 in the rest of the world and that the rest of us haven't managed to make democratic socialism work. It's also forced the American governments to do things in an underhanded and below-board manner (and to the detriment of freedom) because they can't have a hysteria-free debate on certain toics like the rest of the us have.
Its like the whole "gun" thing. Again, the much of the rest of the civilised world does without the level of gun nuttery baggage, and yet curiously we're not at the mercy of warlords or jackbooted thugs or what have you.
It's sad, really. Much of the country desperately needs to get a sense of perspective.
Such a pity, then, that the handset makers and carriers have torpedoed that openness.
In the real world, from a "real users" perspective iOS and Windows Mobile are "more open" than many Android sets. Hell, I can jailbreak an iPhone much more easily than I could a carrier-locked Droid or G1, and at least Apple doesn't screw me out of updates.
Nokia's dominance is misinterpreted. Yes, they sell a lot of phones, but at thin margins and on a platform that doesn't seem much development, nor to people likely to run or buy anything for their phone anyway.
I have an E72 and like it (and an E71 before that, and an N80 before that_, but the apps are piss-poor in functionality next to Android or iOS, the interface clunky, the development environment troubling and the phones themselves very, very low spec. As far as "where the money is" they're well back of RIM and Microsoft and show no intention of addressing the serious strategic problems that have kept them that way.
You want to know what to do? Vote for candidates that both sides of the aisle don't like. You know, the candidates who are fundamentally incompatible with corporatism. And no, this doesn't mean libertarians. Libertarianism is useful idiocy for the wealthy, which is why hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of video are shovelled at Tea Party candidates while the Greens have to make do with table scraps.
You wanted hope? You wanted change? You should have voted for Nader.
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That would be "The Big Lie" strategy. At the risk of a Godwin, guess who named it and made famous it's use?
They had Word/Excel/PowerPoint on phones for seven or so years. It wasn't a hit because people will, at most, just use them to view existing documents, and you could have done that on a BlackBerry and gotten a better device in every way.
People don't edit and create content on phones, by and large, or at least not the kind of content that's authored in Microsoft Word: Lobotomized Edition.
And this is the problem: no one cared that you could run Word or Excel on a smartphone. Heck, people barely cared that you could hack your Win32 code to run on WinCE that cost as much as a PC and ran a quarter as well. The Windows/Office ecosystem the extended neatly across desktops and servers doesn't work on phones.
Microsoft, to their credit, finally got this in WP7. The question is: why choose WP7 over anything else? I mean, the only reason WM sold at all was that it had captive vertical-market buyers who needed to run Windows apps, or that it was free with your contract. For WP7, and in the era of Android, that isn't the case.
Many people, especially many upper-level executives, consider the need to boot up into Windows (or Linux, or Mac OS X) and use full, heavy-weight applications to do simple things like reading mail as something they really, really care about.
The Slate is a very different device, and, equipped with Windows, it's going down the same rabbit-hole HP went down already---without success---with the tc1000. People who want a full PC usually don't want a tablet's compromised input devices, and people who want a tablet don't want a desktop OS and it's baggage.
You used a tc1000? You have my sympathy. That thing was awful: the Transmeta CPU was slow as molasses in January, the WiFi reception poor, bits would break off of it at a whim (I lost locking tabs for the battery and keyboard in a month) and XP tablet was just wretched. Going through digitizer tips was just the icing on the cake. And it was the best of it's era.
I think I used the USB ports only a handful of times (and the CF slot and VGA port never), and the stylus I gave up on as it was faster to use the hardware keyboard, what with the digitizing delay and Newton-esque misspellings.
When I saw the iPad, I was fully prepared for it to be the contemporary tc1000. Only, instead of building a device to spec (must have USB ports, must have flash card slot, must run Windows, must be dockable into a full PC, must have removeable battery) it was built to an experience (must not suck to use). I know a lot of people call this the "Ooh, shiny!" factor, but it really is much more than that: the device works, and does so in a consistent and pleasing manner because it was designed to meet an expectation of usability, rather than some geek's wishlist marketing exec's bullet-point spec sheet. It took my days to find something about the iPad that pissed me off; it took minutes to do that on the tc1000.
Better yet, the upper-management types for whom the iPad really works well for haven't found anything that pisses them off. I can tell you that certainly wasn't the case with the tc1000, whose out-of-box experience scuttled a further deployment.
The iPad works really well as a device on which you primarily view content, mildly interact with it, and rarely create it. It's a great replacement for a Blackberry for people who deal with attachments (such as the aforementioned Veeps who read emails and view Excel and PowerPoint docs created by others and get frustrated trying to use a BB and do better with a simple phone). It's a good tool (once wrapped in a tough case) for service technicians and drivers/delivery personnel, assuming your data collection applications are well-designed. It absolutely is the wrong tool for spreadsheet jockeys, order-entry clerks and probably not great for most IT people (for whom it's, at best a complementary tool). In a corporate deployment you have to consider the experience of the user, and this is why the tc1000 (and it's ilk) failed: it wasn't designed for a specific experience, and ended up being a jack-of-no-trades-master-of-nothing.
I don't think you'll ever (for a given value of "ever") see a device that can take decent notes. Note-taking (and voice transcription) is one of those things that computers universally suck at, and that pen-and-paper do quite well. If you're dependent on written input, any technology is going to feel like a solution in search of a problem.
No, it doesn't. I owned an E71 and N86 (both newer than your E61) and, quite honestly, both do a pathetic job of web browsing and a slightly-less-than-pathetic job at handling email. Yes, it doesn't do IMAP idle, but Nokia didn't reach something remotely resembling parity on the email front until Messaging was released, and even then it's a glitchy bugger of an app. Web browsing remains just as bad as ever.
If you can't see what the iPhone offered versus S60, well, then, I don't know what to say.
Well, there was the little issue of, you know, the user interface. The iPhone did show you what you could do with your phone, and it did it by not being completely irritating to use the way Symbian, Windows Mobile or BBOS were. Sure, it didn't have a 8 megapixel camera, or a hardware keyboard, or better-than-EDGE networking. But it turns out that people didn't really want those things: they wanted a phone that didn't suck to use.
I remember when the iPhone came out. I was working with Windows Mobile devices, mostly, at the time but did have some experience with Symbian and used a BB day-in-day-out and Apple's device didn't just move the goalposts on user experience, it changed the game. RIM you can excuse because they never pretended to make anything other than a perfect email device, but Microsoft and Nokia were either shamelessly arrogant or grossly incompetent in sticking with their completely-broken systems for so long.
I remember getting a new N86 8MP new when I dunked my E71. Compared to my partner's first-gen iPhone it was better in every way, except when it came to actually using it, and that was years after the iPhone debuted. Someone at Nokia should have figured that out the day Apple's device came out because there was no excuse for the N86 or N97 sucking as badly as they did. And no, the half-baked, orphaned-at-launch N900 was not the answer.
And there's no "huge political agenda" opposing global warming? No entrenched mulit-billion dollar industries with long and deep ties to governments? Really?
Please. There's a few billion, if that, involved in pro-AGCC benefactors. There's trillions of dollars on the other side of the aisle.
The "skeptic side" has always had an audience.
Heck, they've retrenched their position several times now. Back when "skepticism" was the default and climate science was fighting to be heard, it used to be "Is it even happening?" and changed to "Well, it happening, but it's not people's fault". Now--especially that actions are being taken---the dialogue has gotten particularly shrill and it's either "Well, how can we trust the scientists when there's 'differences of opinion'" or "It's a conspiracy!". And while I'm sure that there's a few genuine skeptics out there, the bulk of the argument is carried by people better described as "denialists" who aren't skeptical of the science but do have a vested ideological or financial issue with changing our consumption patterns.
Very few "skeptics" don't think it's happening and are generally arguing about degree and detail. Denialists are taking that disagreement in much the same way Creationists take debate about the details of how evolution works and proxy it into "Not even the scientists are certain, so how can we be sure it's happening at all?"
Let's be honest, here. Nokia shipped almost half a billion bottom-feeder, cheap-as-it-gets third-world specials. What few smartphones they do sell are barely smart, have effectively no app development community, and exist solely as "the cheapest option" among the smartphones available, and that market is getting slowly eaten away by a hundred cheap Android devices.
Nokia's "commanding lead in marketshare" is worthless. This move more or less confirms that; if it wasn't, they wouldn't need Microsoft's "help".
This assumes the PC market functions the same way as the cellphone market. That doesn't seem to be the case: the user expertise is generally lower, web (and web-based/derived) interfaces and modern development environments lower the barriers to cross-platform development and intraplatform fragmentation is a much larger problem (especially on Android), the device's useful lifetime is shorter and the cost to the consumer much lower.
Android could be the largest player in the market, but it will never dominate it the way Windows has dominated the PC market because it's a fundamentally different market.
What? That's crazy talk. No, that's worse, it's socialism!, just like trusting the government provide health care, pensions or a basic necessities like food or shelter.
Note that this is entirely different from trusting the government with an arsenal of weapons and tens of thousands of people under arms. That's perfectly ok.
The problem isn't that they don't have a plan, it's that they have about five or six different plans, all half-baked, self-competing and receiving of little attention. The above comparison to General Motors is very apt.
Nokia's smartphones don't matter. They sell a lot of handsets, but those handsets see little or no app development and contribute, per unit, very little margin. They're number one, but in an irrelevant way.
And I say this as a past owner of several handsets and an erstwhile fan. Nokia has no PC-side leverage like Microsoft, lacks the enterprise management tools that BlackBerry does, and has nothing like the developer momentum of Android or iOS. The phones and the core functionality are solid, but the UI is still clunky (as of Symbian^3), the applications often buggy or sub-par, the developer direction highly unclear (so is it Symbian this week? Maemo/Meego/Waytogo? Are we still pushing Ovi?) and so forth.
They've taken too long and frittered away too much opportunity, much like Motorola did before them. Mark my words, they're going to end up a maker of cheap, commodity phones, competing with LG and Samsung's low-ball offerings for the free-with-your-plan subscription. Or rather, they will until they start spinning off business units left, right and centre.
No, but most, if not all, of the major patent holders are part of MPEG-LA.
It's not FUD, by the way. For a large organization who might license WebM or produce content encoded with WebM/VP8 it's a serious issue. Google is not doing the format any favours by letting it's largest potential users assume serious risk.
I don't like it any more than you do, but putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "FUD!" won't make the problem go away.
If Google is serious---really serious---about WebM from the perspective of software freedom, then they need to do two things: one, they need to make the format an open, vendor-independent standard and two, they need to show they have some skin in the game and indemnify their customers and users.
Google will not indemnify you against infringement suits. Anyone who chooses to use WebM is actually at more of a risk than someone choosing to use H.264 in that respect.
There's some things like like about WebM, but Google's altruism isn't one of them. They're in this for themselves.
It's not a matter of privilege, it's a matter of technology and cost. Why should a commercial developer devote resources to supporting hardware that has long since made them any money and whose support probably diverts resources from new initiatives.
Time and technology marches on, and if you can't afford, say, an hundred-dollar Atom desktop that could play h.264 then, well, it's unfortunate. It's not like Apple or Microsoft or even Canonical built a kill-switch into their software, it's that you can't reasonably expect a developers to waste tens or hundreds of man-hours trying to shoehorn capability into a 10+ year old machine. There's a point of declining returns in play.
Should we support 286s still? ST506 drives? CGA adapters?
Or do you mean we could hold back video on the internet to appeal to people with ten-year old hardware. How would we force content providers to downsample everything to 172x144 15fps Sorenson or MPEG1? I'm a dyed in the wool socialist and even I think that's an impractical thing to do.
He could mean, say, the iPod Touch, and it is a valid concern: there are a lot of devices like it, devices that support hardware-accelerated h.264 but might not ever see an update for WebM. Even if Android ends up ruling the world, there's still years worth of sales of other devices to deal with.
I don't think people appreciate how embedded h.264 is. It's the primary codec for Flash, for BluRay, for DivX/Xvid. It's in phones, tablets, embedded devices, etc. I'd feel better if Google was doing this for altruistic reasons, but they're not fully opening WebM, nor are they offering patent indemnification. Nor is WebM demonstrably better than h.264. Google has Youtube in it's favour, but that's really about it. I don't believe you can even get hardware-accelerated WebM in new Android devices, let alone upgrade older ones.
Meanwhile, h.264's licensing terms are well known, understood and not completely unreasonable, and it's more or less guaranteed to play on a whole bunch of extant devices.
A 400MHz G4... Let's see... That's something like my G4 Cube, which was release in 2000.
Yeah. Apple's restrictions are all that's keeping you from running a modern browser and OS on a ten year old machine. I seriously suggest you try running Chrome 9, Firefox 4 or IE9 under Win7 or Ubuntu 10.04 a P2-400 with 256 to 512MB RAM. While you're at it, try to play back an HTML5 video streamed from the web.. Let us know how it goes.
Apple is just codifying what is, for intents and purposes, a functional limitation. If I were them, I wouldn't waste resources trying to support ten-year old hardware, either. It's nice that, eg, you can run an XFCE-based desktop under Linux on that kind of hardware and perform basic tasks, but you're still up against the "Try and run a modern browser and play back H.264 or WebM video" restriction.
It implies a collapse of a free and civil society for the same reason that universal health care, sane drug laws and a tax structure not best described as Byzantine does: Americans are terrified of their government but have no problem with oligarchs having their way with them. This situation suits the upper class just fine---they get to keep society's eyes off their own goings-on by fingering government at every occasion.
Despite the rest of the western world providing a working counterexample, many American citizens still think it's 1776 in the rest of the world and that the rest of us haven't managed to make democratic socialism work. It's also forced the American governments to do things in an underhanded and below-board manner (and to the detriment of freedom) because they can't have a hysteria-free debate on certain toics like the rest of the us have.
Its like the whole "gun" thing. Again, the much of the rest of the civilised world does without the level of gun nuttery baggage, and yet curiously we're not at the mercy of warlords or jackbooted thugs or what have you.
It's sad, really. Much of the country desperately needs to get a sense of perspective.
Such a pity, then, that the handset makers and carriers have torpedoed that openness.
In the real world, from a "real users" perspective iOS and Windows Mobile are "more open" than many Android sets. Hell, I can jailbreak an iPhone much more easily than I could a carrier-locked Droid or G1, and at least Apple doesn't screw me out of updates.
Nokia's dominance is misinterpreted. Yes, they sell a lot of phones, but at thin margins and on a platform that doesn't seem much development, nor to people likely to run or buy anything for their phone anyway.
I have an E72 and like it (and an E71 before that, and an N80 before that_, but the apps are piss-poor in functionality next to Android or iOS, the interface clunky, the development environment troubling and the phones themselves very, very low spec. As far as "where the money is" they're well back of RIM and Microsoft and show no intention of addressing the serious strategic problems that have kept them that way.
You want to know what to do? Vote for candidates that both sides of the aisle don't like. You know, the candidates who are fundamentally incompatible with corporatism. And no, this doesn't mean libertarians. Libertarianism is useful idiocy for the wealthy, which is why hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of video are shovelled at Tea Party candidates while the Greens have to make do with table scraps.
You wanted hope? You wanted change? You should have voted for Nader.
Remember the kerfuffle when Ralph Nader wondered if Obama would become a metaphorical "Uncle Tom" to corporate interests? This is what he meant.
Seeing this makes me miss the Amiga even more. Yes, I know you couldn't get Keen on the Amiga. Ask me if thought that was a great loss.