So you are suggesting the solution to privacy issues is a proprietary black box, where one benevolent corporation, who is trying to eek every bit of profit out their platform, is the only one in control? That's the solution? Really? Have we already forgotten the situation where iOS was keeping a log of the phone's location?

At least with Android I know I can flash a new (AOSP) ROM where every line of code is OSS, and know what is truly happening with my device.

And the TMobile Sidekick by Danger (now Microsoft) did it many years before Opera. Nothing to see here. Move along.

And if the market for devices capable of creation shrinks, prices for such devices will likely rise due to loss of economies of scale.

So Amazon shouldn't try to slim tablet features down to hit a $199 price point, and instead charge 5-600 for a full-featured tablet like everyone else, because if they do it might theoretically drive the price of content-creation devices up? You...kill...me.

Do you all whine like this because a Ford Fiesta doesn't have the same features as a BMW 3 Series? Should economy cars not be built because they are a barrier of entry for those that want a rear view camera and a high fidelity sound system so they can park in a tight spot while their ears are delighted? Amazon is putting out a very attractively priced tablet with slimed-down features. If you want the additional features, go pay $500 for an IPad or a Xoom. This has been done in every competitive market before - stop acting like it's a new abomination.

At least this exercise taught us one thing: The wrong way to transition a product to open source. Google should have made this announcement and the prior "cancellation" announcement one single communication. Instead, they freaked out their community and received a bunch of negative reaction. All the time, they were doing the exact thing we always hope companies will do: release a proprietary product as open source.

Very true. I suspect the more likely scenario is that traditional nuclear power goes away from reactions to Fukashima, and in the future we use safer thorium reactors. In the meantime we make plugin electric cars that are usable/useful by the masses and have extended range, which are powered by thorium plants feeding the grid rather than the carbon-producing coal plants that dominate today. Cars powered by thorium, though indirectly.

For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to get +5. I was just responding to the comment. The sad thing is the +5 has more to do with my comment being high on the thread. Try to get +5 by adding a comment near the bottom of a long thread; it's almost impossible. That's why so many people reply to early comments when their reply isn't at all related to what they are replying to.

No, you have to charge 43% extra to break even when Apple takes a 30% cut. For instance, if a book is 1.00 normally, you need to charge 1.43 because 1.43 * .3 = .429. This means the margin is so high it's not even close to competitive with Apple's own products.

Sort of. The difference is, NFC is in wide circulation with MasterCard PayPass and Visa Paywaive.

People seem to be ignoring the massive difficulty and investment in bringing the point-of-sale in alignment with the mobile device. Google has solved this by partnering with MasterCard to allow their wallet to work via NFC with PayPass POS devices which were already deployed at many merchants. It is difficult to imagine that BT4 could compete with that built-in install base. Apple would be smart to integrate NFC rather than attempting to blaze their own trail. It certainly is not impossible, but it doesn't make much sense.

And all have their hardware, or use hardware, manufactured in China...

Isn't that the way we want it? High wage white collar engineering jobs in the U.S. and laborers working at low wages in bad conditions so they can make us glorious technology that only we can afford?

It sure seems en vogue for Americans to hate on the American experience while living in the most affluent country in the history of the world. Sad, really.

Even if the information carried by inaudible sound waves is "cryptographically sound", it's certainly not a secure "wallet". Bragging that it doesn't rely on a chip may sound great, but there's more to Google Wallet's NFC chip than simple radio communications. The chip also serves as what Google calls a "Secure Element". This allows Google Wallet to securely store your card details and payment details inside a completely secure chip that's sandboxed from the OS itself.

If this technology is secure at communicating, but not secure at storing your card details, it's pretty useless (imho). Unless you think entering your card details every time you want to pay is better than carrying the card in your wallet.

Tonido plug is an open source wal mart server, similar to PogoPlug. I've never used it, but it sounds like exactly what you are looking for. FLOSS Weekly had a nice episode on Tonido. They have web, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry clients and are completely OSS, including the server and clients.

Being an employee of a major corporation, I'd offer a different theory. I've watched us go from no-Macs to maybe 100 Macs in the past quarter. It has nothing to do "I have a Mac at home". It has everything to do with iOS development. iPhones and iPads are now supported devices in the enterprise. We can now receive our corporate email on iOS devices, where previously this was restricted to BlackBerry devices.

As a result, internal corporate applications are being developed in iOS. The iPad in particular is attractive as a business tool. Carrying one to a corporate meeting is as easy as carrying a notebook, and the company doesn't even have to pay for the hardware because many people already bring their own to work.

Since Apple has created a situation where you can only develop for iOS on OSX, voila, we have a large number of OSX machines by necessity.

linux prevailed, firefox prevailed

Both were built as an alternative to a dominate proprietary product owned by an onerous, tight-fisted corporate entity. The same could be said for Open Office, XMPP, Apache HTTP, Android, and a variety of products that "prevailed". Thus, they had a groundswell of community support.

The difference here is, Java is a GPL product. A number of alternative languages built on the JVM have cropped up, but they are competing with "free" (the freedom and beer variety). I've yet to see any do much "killing" of Java. Scala, Groovy, and Clojure are all popular in their own right, but haven't made a dent on the enormous Java community. Further, most of them depend heavily on an inherent ability to utilize the S2JDK.

I find this to be much ado about nothing.

I personally think this is all about tethering. The telcos are charging an obscene $20 - $30 to use the bandwidth you already paid for. And a lot of people want to tether, even the average Joe who normally doesn't know the first thing about ROMs and bootloaders.

The telcos are aware that rooted phones can tether for free. I know several people who are completely non-technical who have rooted Android to tether for free. There is significant money on the table. Money that most of us feel is raping and pillaging, but money none the less.

You've given a reasonable case against Motorola. Who do you recommend (for Android)? Who has a good track record of delivering what they promise? Perhaps more importantly, who has a good track record of supporting updates for phones that are no longer being sold?

I have a Motorola Droid, and I've had no problem because I've just rooted it and installed my own upgrades. My bigger concern with Motorola is their trend of attempting to DRM lock the bootloader to prevent rooting. They make it harder for us to support ourselves when they no longer do it sufficiently. The Bionic looks like a great device, but they are apparently locking it pretty heavily, making it very unattractive for me.