Truly Free phones?

[Ryan Rix]

Not top posting cause Tuna is mean :P

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Joseph Sinclair <plug-discussion at stcaz.net
> wrote:

> While Google (and others) develop the Android O/S, the carriers make all
> the decisions about how open the phone is.  The G1 is a *T-Mobile* phone,
> not a Google Phone.

Amen, brother. :)


>  Because Android is mostly Apache licensed, the carriers are free to modify
> it however they like for "their" phones, and they do exactly that.

This is why the GPL was written as opposed to the APL or MPL or BSD
license... WHY aren't these things under the GPL??


>
> The T-Mobile G1, like any other T-Mobile Phone, is a locked phone, and you
> can only run the apps that T-Mobile permits.  Google wrote the software
> open-source, but T-Mobile locked down the phone environment.
>

If I were to purchase a G1 from the manufacture or "unlocked" from eBay,
craigslist, could it run with a T-Mobile SIM card? Can I reflash it to get
rid of this limitation with it still "working?"


> Even the Freerunner is difficult to get service with in the US, our
> carriers mostly still have Ma-Bell Monopoly envy, and want to lock you into
> their network so they don't have to actually compete.


Tuna: What carrier are you on with your Freerunner?


>
>
> There are supposed to be several more Android-based phones (and a couple
> netbooks) released in the next 3-6 months, so if you can wait a little bit,
> that might be good.
>
> You can develop for the Android environment without a phone using the
> development SDK, it's a qemu-based virtual machine, so it works just like a
> real phone from a development perspective.
>
Doesn't really do me any good though without a phone ;)


>
> Android applications are Java applications written for the Dalvik
> environment.  While it's possible to write a Python app for Android, you'll
> find it extremely hard to get it on the phone (you have to create a custom
> build of the O/S and reflash the phone), and your battery life will likely
> suffer greatly due to Python's higher overhead compared to Dalvik.
> The better approach in this case would be to write the code that will run
> in the phone in Java (standard Java 5), because the Dalvik environment (and
> it's unusual lifecycle management) is needed to maintain good battery life
> when apps are running.  You can still write the netbook code in Python, or
> you can use Java there as well.

I just provided Python as an example. Is there any native framework for the
OS?


Why hasn't the FSF done anything about this as much as cell phones are a
part of this culture?

-- 
Thanks and best regards,
Ryan Rix
TamsPalm - The PalmOS Blog
(623)-239-1103 <-- Grand Central, baby!

Jasmine Bowden - Class of 2009, Marc Rasmussen - Class of 2008, Erica
Sheffey - Class of 2009, Rest in peace.
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