I carried a Windows Phone in place of my usual Android device for about 45 days at the start of the year to understand what the experience was like. My take away is that while it is a serviceable OS, it still has many of the shortcoming that the other smartphone platforms have grown out of. Also, it occasionally errs on the side of "pretty graphic design" over usability. I wrote up a full article on my experience here: https://plus.google.com/100566622327534003774/posts/RyT3Ajwd1GX

A bellicose feller named Teller
That prominent atom bomb seller
Promotes with aplomb
The hydrogen bomb
And tells the uncertain they're yeller!

-- lifted from the back column of a science mag of my childhood

I've put this on my Galaxy Tab 10.1, which I recently updated to a developer release of CyanogenMod9 (The forthcoming ICS based Cyanogen). It really is nice. I can load up the full desktop version of Google+, which only sorta-kinda worked under the standard ICS browsers, and sorta-kinda worked differently under Firefox mobile, and it works 100%, no compromises. And doesn't feel much slower than my desktop either. That's great! The only annoyance is that it does seem to identify itself as a mobile browser, and I haven't yet found an option to change the user agent. No problem for sites like Wikipedia or G+ that give you a link to escape their mobile versions, but could be annoying elsewhere, since so many mobile sites are terrible. Surprising overside, since the stock browser in ICS includes an option to "request desktop site".

To me, this story shows the importance of keeping Project Gutenberg moving forward, slowly but steadily.

...I feel bad these suckers who are lining up to buy "a cheap carbon copy".

I have the Galaxy Tab myself, and really like it, but I've also played with an Eee Transformer and was very impressed. I previously had the Xoom, and it was okay, but it's screen wasn't as good as the former two. The 10.1" Android Tablets have higher resolution screens than the current crop of iPads (1200x800 vs 1024x768), meaning a slightly higher DPI, meaning slightly easier on the eyes for reading.

Honeycomb gives you lots of flexibility as to how you get PDFs on to the device (e.g. via Dropbox, local file transfer, etc) combined with the freedom to then view those PDFs with the app of your choice. Android has a version of Adobe Reader, which while feature light, is pretty much guaranteed to correctly render any PDF you throw at it. For my own purposes though, I typically use RepliGo, which handles most things, is notably faster, and lets you view and add notes in PDFs.

Wait a minute here, the linked article says "A new study from open source services vendor OpenLogic reports that 71 percent of Apple iOS and Google Android apps are not in compliance." Yet the headline for this story mentions only Android. I understand it's become fashionable to bash Android lately, but this seems a bit egregious. The problem appears to be endemic across all mobile devices.

Actually, unless that software you were referring to was "copy-protected" in some fashion (just an early form of DRM), with the plethora of emulators & virtual machines available, you probably could get that old software running on your modern hardware if you needed or wanted to. And that's because you do own it, and have the ability to use those bits you purchased in any manner you see fit, including transferring them to machines and environments that could not have been forseen when they were first sold.

That's really all I want from my ebooks (and my music, and my video), to be able to keep moving it forward on to new platforms.

So no, it's not the same thing at all...

While mentioning the FSF, it's also worth pointing out Richard Stallman's old "science fiction" story, _The Right to Read_

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

It's worth checking in with it every few years to see how close we've gotten to that particular dystopia.

If you look around, you can find stuff, usually from the smaller stores, or direct from smaller publishers. For Science Fiction & Fantasy, Baen offers quite a lot of books through their Webscriptions service (although I think newer stuff is now getting funneled into the "rental" market and thus not showing up on Webscriptions). Daniel Keyes Moran just started fsand.com to publish the back catalog of several of his SF writer buddies in open formats. I've also found open books on places like Fictionwise (you have to read carefully to determine which books are being sold in open formats and which come encrusted).

Pragmatic Programmers sells all their technical books direct in open formats. Role playing game books from most publishers can now be found in unrestricted formats from drivethrurpg.com. It's pretty much only the popular fiction market (and the large sellers) that are locked into customer hostile practices.

A recent insight that came to me is that when paying money to access any content encrusted with DRM, you should never think of the transaction as a sale, but merely as a rental. You have not purchased anything you can own, merely gotten the temporary (long or short term) use of it, and under limited circumstances (use on particular devices, or in particular programs).

Consider the reasonableness of what you are paying according that formula. For my part, I might be willing to pay 2 or 3 dollars to rent a book that I might otherwise purchase for 10 dollars in hard copy, but I have no interest in paying that same price or more to rent a book that I could pay to own it (whether that ownership be in hardcopy, or unencumbered electronic file that I may use when, where and how I see fit).

The FSF "Defective by Design" campaign has promoted the idea of reading DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management", but I propose you could also call it "Digital Rental Management". Once consumers begin to understand the nature of transactions involving DRM (that they are not making a purchase in traditional sense, and that having paid their money, they own nothing as a result) then I think they will be begin to demand pricing in line with what is actually being offered to them.

...to donate to Wikipedia!