Well I for one replaced my Netbook with an ASUS Eee Pad Transformer.... Dead, no - transformed is more like it.

Same here, that is why I share my root read-only with guest access

Also the more important I find the data the longer I seed it.

Seeing that I live in a developing country and see all this about piracy I have to say one thing:

Please do not lower price on movies, music or even software even if it is proven to lower piracy. The problem I see with this is that more money will then be leaving the country and head of to Hollywood land. I prefer the money stay here and be used for other things like education, hell even if the pirates use it to buy sweets its better than sending it off to some 1st world country.

I will even give you an excuse not to do it. If you lower the price for us to be able to afford things legally you will have to drop the price back home as well. What will stop someone from USA to go buy his software/movies from India, Brazil, Africa or even Russia. Instead raise the prices, that way I can maybe get more companies onto Linux as well.

In the private sector I have been doing this for years, because of security. If a user want to access his Gmail/private mail he can use his mobile not via my network and if management agrees I would place a shared system in areas that is on a separate network for such uses.

Or what can happen (heaven help Apple and Microsoft if it does) is when all this Android hardware manufacturers + Google pool their patent portfolio's and use that to fight back.

I seriously don't want only one phone in the market, Microsoft Desktop OS taught me that, we need at least 3 or 4 equally sized markets.

The problem with WM7 for manufacturers is that with the fear of fragmentation Microsoft went ahead and :
1 Dictated the hardware, so as manufacturer don't have much say on how the device going to look, no small screen with dedicated keyboard or such designs, so in essence no real distinction between one manufacturer’s phone to another. This would not be a problem if it was not for the second point.
2 Manufacturers are not allowed to change the UI to place there own “look & feel” to the phone. So end of the day one WM7 phone is exactly like the other.

We all know a HTC (Android), Apple (iOS), or Motorola (Android) phone just by looking at it. But all the WM7 phones look and feel the same. For some people that is selling point but for a manufacturer it not. How can you make someone buy your WM7 phone and not your competitions.

I do think that ZTE will sell WM7 phones they just want a cash incentive to do so.

Personally I don't like the WM7 blocky interface or the half words that break to show that there is a next screen, and I do think Microsoft did a bad thing aiming something that you cant really customize to gamers 1st (Xbox Live). They should have targeted a market that hates customization – the work place, in other words they should have build better Office/ Exhange/ Sharepoint integration instead, cause that is where they can seriously 1 up the competition.

As a previous owner of an iPhone and now on my second Android phone:

1st I treat android market as a simple “apt-get” installer for my phone.

I never use it to look for applications, I use Google search or web reviews instead and use the QT codes to get my applications. Same thing I would do with any Windows or Linux application. If you want the secure walled garden go use Amazon or start your own app store, no one is stopping you, hell you can maybe even make a living off it.

Sure there is applications that can harm your phone and yes there is plenty of applications that copy others. I rather have the power myself if I want VLC or some porn app on my phone than some corporation that thinks its inappropriate. Sure if I install all kinds of junk without reading reviews and looking at security permissions I deserve to install and AV application or have my data send, this is happening to PC's all the time, what makes my phone any different after all it is a “personal” computer.

I can find plenty of games that is similar/copied to ones being sold by big developers on the PC. The difference normally is support + quality. Yes Google takes it time to remove offending software . I rather them do a proper investigations than some competitor being able to remove my app just cause he made a simple request to Google.

Give me free market any day isn't that what capitalism is all about? Or do you want to live in a social environment where you have some government(apple) tell you what you can or can not have on your phones.

Only problem I have with Google market is that allot of countries are still not allowed to have/get paid for applications like China, India, South Africa and so on, maybe if they address that issue we wont have so many copied applications cause I do think many are copied and replaced as free just because people in the countries above can not access the paid for applications. Just give everyone access to paid applications. They can still limit the developers in those countries to upload free applications only if they afraid of them selling pirated software.

Wow that is allot of data, I have 2 x 5Gb/month in South Africa. Granted its 3G and I use sim for PC and one for cell phone.

Was something getting use to when I recently moved from New Zealand where I had 40Gb/month. As for ADSL in South Africa they have an uncapped system where 1, its so slow that you wont ever hit 150G and 2 they normally throttle you to hell and gone when you come close to it.

The normal users here gets 3 Gb/month international and 10 Gb/month local that only kicks in once you used up the 3 Gb

Then you get people like me, I have limited bandwidth (5 gig per month)

I love having my games in Steam but prefer to buy physical copies as buying download only tends to limit my bandwidth usage for that month.
The great thing about Steam is that I can always play games in off-line mode when I don't want to waste bandwidth which brings me to another problem that is surfacing lately, Ubisoft and Windows Life games, where you have to be online all the time to be able to play a single player game that you bought.

I always crack those games just so I don't have to be online the whole time.

I remember the time where pirating or cracking games where more painful than legally buying a game, its such a shame that pirated versions now became easier and less problematic to play that legal games. Hell even the virus/Trojans that come with some cracks do less damage than the legal DRM games.

Oh and 9 times out of 10 to get a game to work in wine/linux it helps to crack it 1st