[OT?] Android phones

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:34 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> | From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
>
> | - They need the phones certified by FCC (US)/DOC (Canada)
>
> I thought that all phones now had one hidden processor ("baseband") to
> do the radio things that the FCC and DOC care about and that Android
> runs on a separate, non-critical processor.

That may be.  My overall point wasn't really to look at specific
process, rather just to poke at the notion that there are a bunch of
things that need to be done when deploying new mobile handsets, such
that it's not overly reasonable to expect an 8 week turnaround.

> So: maybe the flurry of Android releases will have the salutory effect
> of making verdor value-subtracting painful to the perpetrators.

Possibly.

> | - They need to negotiate pricing and such with sources
>
> Naive question: why should there be a pricing of a firmware update?

Actually, I didn't have firmware in mind in this.

The thing I see people griping isn't about the way updates get
deployed, but rather people whining to the effect:

"I bought this phone in February...  It's just *fraudulent* that it
doesn't already include the version of Android that was released to
developers a whole 18 days ago!"

And it's *not* fraudulent.  It's not particularly reasonable to expect
that degree of velocity of deployment for a platform that's still
pretty new.

> | Few OSS projects attempt remotely similar...  Think about release rates...
>
> I don't know enough about how big a deal an Android release is.  Is it
> really comparable to a full Linux distro release?

Probably not.  It seems more plausible to compare to something like
GNOME or KDE.  Or perhaps that, too, is a more complex "ecosystem."

> I like my Nokia n800 (a tablet, not a phone).  But I really hate that
> Nokia seems to support these platforms for a year or so then abandon
> support for them (770, n800, n810, n900).

I saw an announcement today that the first "Meego" release is now
available for N900.  Of course, that fits into the "first year"
scenario.

> If Android updates continue to flow to old phones, that would be a
> real feather in the ecosystem's cap.  That really depends on the
> incentives for the relevant players.  OpenMoko, if it succeeded, ought
> to have accomplished that: the OpenMoko customer is the owner of the
> phone, not the pusher.

Generally agreed.

The trouble with mobile phones is that the carriers come out of the
"jealous paranoid control freaks" traditions of the old time phone
companies.

It's kind of entertaining to see Apple competing in this arena, as
Steve Jobs seems to have fit into this milieu with remarkable success.
 He can evidently play "control freak" with the best of them.

The way that financing and contracts work, the carriers are commonly
focused on a rather opposite approach in various ways.  They're keen
on extending contracts, and are happy to give away hardware to
encourage this.  In some essential ways, you don't really own the
phone, and the carriers wouldn't have been at all keen on OpenMoko
changing that.
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