[OT?] Android phones

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 11:40:11PM -0400, Herb Richter wrote:
> I am considering buying a smart phone and have been trying to make sense  
> of the offerings and their specs.
>
> I do like the Nexus One, now that Google is shipping it into Canada  
> (with some warrantee).
>
> The new HTC EVO 4G <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_EVO> does have a  
> feature I would like - the ability to act as a mobile hotspot (hosting  
> up to 8 wi-fi devices) 
>
> I wouldn't need to host 8 but I would want to tether(?) my netbook  
> wirelessly (wi-fi not bluetooth).
>
> My question is: Would wi-fi tethering/hosting be hardware dependent or 
> might one be able to install suitable software to have the Nexus phone 
> act as a gateway/router etc?
>
> Herb Richter
>
> BTW - is there a reason phone handsets with wi-fi never (it seems) have  
> wireless-n (just b/g) ?

Much cheaper wifi chip, and probably a lot less power required to run it.

Personally I am very torn on the Android phones.  I was rather interested
in them until recently.  Google simply declaring they were going to fork
from the main linux tree and not even try to get their changes in has
really turned me off the android entirely.  To me the requirements for
getting code accepted are very reasonable.  The code has to fit coding
style, be maintainable and such.  That's not a lot to ask.  Apparently
google wants to control everything themselves and don't want to hear
that some of their design choices should be cleaned up.  Every other
piece of linux kernel code I have ever dealt with that wasn't trying
to get merged was a pile of shit.  So now I expect android to turn into
a pile of shit (assuming it isn't already which may very likely be the
case given it isn't already anywhere near mergeable).

So well, now I don't want one.  If I can't have a Linux based phone that
actually runs linux with a chance of using a mainline kernel some day,
then I am not interested.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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