Thoughts about Mobile and Open Source

"No carrier wants geeks. Geeks use up a lot of network resources, try to find ways around rules, and create problems for tech support. Every time a carrier has flirted with geeks, it has backed away. Helio was originally conceived as a "power user's carrier," but it did an unexplained about-face and decided to go for the social-networking youth when it launched. T-Mobile did a similar thing a few years ago, changing its theme from "get more" to "stick together.""

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356603,00.asp

The bottom line is that while Linux the OS, the kernel, and the memory manager are attractive to phone manufacturers, Linux the philosophy — and users banding together ad hoc to create new things — is anathema to wireless carriers.

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/2327204/Why-Open-Source-Phones-Still-Fail

The debate reminds me of this "data" issue mentioned above, citing other articles that state data is not the issue from a bandwidth or usage perspective. The issue(s) are due to restrictions placed years ago by the carriers based on their current network and infrastructure limitations (of them being adaptable expansion and ownership/liability issues) + the device attributes like size and capabilities (screen brightness, battery power, etc).

Besides, the iPhone, and many "smartphones" like the Android utilize home or business wireless networks and not 3G or 4G the majority of the time I would venture. Talk time used to be the price point before all the madness of SMS/MMS/MMM... And doesn't the "cloud" address problems with physical storage and bandwidth in and of itself? It's almost pointless to try and watch a "high definition" youTube video if you're not on a "high bandwidth" network, unless you're multitasking or desperate, on an iPhone I've found.

One reality remains for all of this: Apple beat everyone to the market and cornered it before the "open source" folks did (though many would argue Apple's iPhone was borne from years of work by many teams of open and closed source developers long before it was released to the market). Sometimes speed to market matters when it comes to "game changers". Helio was too quick. Sidekick almost made it. Palm got business. And Microsoft, IBM, etc still control through IE6, enterprise software...