Sprint (and Boost Mobile) got RIM to make one for them recently, the Blackberry Style, but the gadget blogs were too busy laughing at the fact that it was a clamshell to notice it was one of RIM's better phones. (As opposed to the Pearl Flip, which like all Pearls, was a piece of garbage.) It's end-of-lifed at Sprint already, though Boost Mobile, a prepaid subsidiary, still has some in stock.

No, because these are local exploits, which aren't as big a deal as a remote exploit for a server. They are enough to root an Android phone though. :-)

I hate to inform you of this, but local root exploits are very common in the Linux kernel. How else do you think Android phones get rooted? They have to either via Linux kernel exploits, or Android exploits, and due to the well-known nature of the former, it's usually those when available. (They usually are.)

My number goes with me, if I chose to, in the US too, I think the UK has this regulation as well. I'm not sure who's market you have in mind for that one.

Of course, the US happens to have a lack of standards, especially with regards CDMA vs GSM and the existence of two standards even for GSM 3g, that make keeping your actual phone, if it's a smartphone, difficult. (Even if you're switching from T-Mobile to AT&T with an unlocked phone, or vice versa, you're unlikely to be able to do better than EDGE speeds on your new carrier; and as for CDMA carriers, there is no such thing basically as an unlocked CDMA phone, and even if you hack one most CDMA carriers besides Cricket don't accept phones from other carriers on their network.)

HP doesn't seem to have much trouble selling more computers than Apple, I'd say it is a terribly small prediction considering that...

The only reason why tablet PCs from them didn't sell was that Tablet PCs sucked, from no fault of HP's (the reason was Microsoft's execution of the tablet platform.) If they've managed to fix that, they'll sell a respectable amount of these. It has the potential to sell more actually, just as Android phones have now sold more handsets than the iPhone.

Proprietary closed platforms, no matter what their benefits, never historically outsell more open computational platforms if a little bit of mass production scale and places to sell the product are behind them, and HP has both of those.

If you haven't used it, grab the free SDK (works on Linux, Mac, and Windows) and take a look at the emulator or take a look at a Palm Pre/Pre Plus. Palm's WebOS has a very smooth interface, something Android is missing to some extent. Also, programming for WebOS is quite open and they allow and even *encourage* modifications and unofficial applications outside the "app catalog", which makes it a lot more open than the iPad.

Unless you want to modify the GUI engine itself (which is basically just a way to throw pixels for a WebKit/V8-based Javascript engine, and for PDK apps, a way to manage slightly SDL, and OpenGLES, and the SDL is part of the GUI that is open source....) WebOS is just as open from a practical standpoint as Android if not slightly more open since no rooting is needed whatsoever. Also, one can modify apps and make themes easily since everything is just Javascript text files basically. (You get a root prompt to do what you want with with the SDK!) When's the last time you could modify Google Maps on Android, for just one example? You can do that with WebOS, closed source or no closed source, the source is there. :-) Homebrewers have added features to it, such as Google Latitude, that Google disabled on WebOS because they have a bit of preferential treatment to Android and their former board member Apple rather than little rival Palm. ;-) Also, many other included apps have all sorts of modifications available for them called "patches". It's very much in the spirit of open source. You can even grab alternative kernels, and enhance the performance of your Pre or Pre Plus (I don't know if they bothered making alternative kernels for the Pixi yet, though that could be interesting...)

It also resembles a standard Linux distro more under the hood than Android really, which is a very good thing, almost all the frameworks you'd find on a Linux desktop, like gstreamer, are there, and the file system hierarchy should be familiar as well. Only the N900 really has it beat as far as that goes, and the N900 is a little *too* Unixy in the interface department unlike WebOS. (Though if you insist, the Homebrew folks have developed Qt and X11 for WebOS too, which makes a wealth of ugly apps such as even OpenOffice, if you want to really torture yourself trying to run it ;-), available for WebOS. ;-) Maybe OpenOffice will run better on the HP Slate though...)