And, furthermore, the "IP money" flowing back to the US would compensate the US's significant trade deficit. Obviously, this is not the case.

Actually, I do use my phone primary for calling. On my very nice smartphone (Samsung i780 - Windows Mobile), I've turned off UMTS and switched right back to plain old GSM + GPRS. As a result, my battery will now last two days, where I can make several long (> 30 mins) calls. And, e-mail/calendar/contact synchronization still work over good old GPRS. As a side effect, phone calls are still much more reliable over GSM than they are over UMTS - at least they are on this phone.

And this basically sums up my experience with these devices over the past couple of years. Getting any pc to do decent tv-out is a nightmare (Modeline Hell as he calls it). Getting sound on both regular outputs and digital outputs with Alsa is "challenging" to say the least. And then I just want the box to suspend and wake-up using a remote. Again, that's possible in theory, but somehow I've never found a board that will reliably go into S3 and wakeup from S3 over and over again. If you finally get it to work once, it suddenly doesn't work the second time.

Finally, I've just switched to a UPNP frontend for my Mythtv backend. It turns on and off in 5-10 secs, does both analog and digital audio outputs and I've never had issues with its tv outputs. I've lost some functionality, but at least it's reliable and "just works".