Yeah, that's exactly it. In my business, we try to design for 0 failures, but that's unrealistic. So we also design in restarts that are fast enough that the outage isn't as noticeable to whoever is using the services. The less our customers customers have to deal with outage, the less our customers have to yell at us, or do bad things with contract clauses. If my PPC embedded controller comes back to life and working in 1 second, then my peripheral services can come back that much faster, and the network is up that much faster. Right now, with our high end boards, reboots using WindRiver Linux cycle completely in about 30 seconds and the environment is completely restored in about 2 minutes. Taking 29 seconds off of two minutes would be a 25% improvement almost, and a huge selling point.

Yeah, my view is US centric, but I can tell you that Motorola will tailor it's UI's for any vendor who asks. In the US, Verizon and Sprint are the big abusers here. Motorola's inability to say no to anyone ever means that a Sprint RAZR looks and acts different than a AT&T RAZR and a Verizon RAZR. The service providers still have a lot of pull both here in the US, and maybe to a lesser extent, in other parts of the world. But for me, the big problem is still the apps. Does Google have enough muscle and the desire to make sure it all just works out? I'm not so sure.

Skype is a good example, but I wonder if Skype won't make a bigger difference for small MID's running a WiMAX/LTE stack or something. They would also likely not have as big a problem with tethering (hopefully). I think things will change quite a bit for service providers when mobile wireless internet service isn't tied to a cellular connection. My hope is that this means the device becomes the most important piece of the connection, not the service provider.

I won't argue the open source nature, but to be honest, most people just don't care. If I were to ask 10 of my friends what they know about how their phone does what it does, 9 of them wouldn't even understand the question, and the 10th wouldn't care. Sad, but true. This also makes distribution and platform ownership so important. How easy is it to use, and do things work the same across different implementations? This is where Apple and Google may be much different. That's my point.

I hope Android does make a go. Motorola is making a big Android push, and same for other vendors I know less about. But letting vendors make many implementation decisions could be a big negative. I give Apple credit in that even though there is only one way to do things, it's a very streamlined and easy way focused on the user. If Google can force certain common design paradigms on vendors, then Android stands a very real chance. And, since it's open source, then development takes a pretty interesting turn for the users who are what really matters in the equation. But there are a lot of ways Google can fail here. And simply relying on being "open" is one of those ways.

OK, so toy might be a bit harsh, but really, the G1 is a non factor for 99% of the worlds phone users. Again, to almost everyone, it doesn't matter what ideologies went into building the platform, but

1. Does it work?
2. Can I install interesting apps?
3. Does it pique user interest? Is it cool?

I guess it can do 1 and 2, but it hasn't really cracked 3 yet. And this is where my point from above comes into play. Google is the platform provider, and owns the app distribution channel. But it doesn't own the implementation. Will device vendors make the implementation of the platform common enough? Will a really cool app for the G1 also work the same and well with Motorola's new wiz bang Android flip phone? Or for FTC's mini slide out keyboard phone? I'm not convinced you'll get all the phone vendors to *do the right thing*.

While all that is true, it's not all that helpful to most, even many developers. I'm an iPhone developer right now, and hate that there are so many restrictions on my apps. But I have consumers for my apps, and to be honest, I can live with the issues (though don't always like them). The G1 is still a toy, so until there are more devices, all the openness doesn't mean as much. To some extent, it's open source nature is irrelevant to most. Unfortunate, but the phone is just a tool, not an ideology. It needs to work and be useful. And if someone makes money from making it useful, then so be it.

Yes, Android is more open, but Google still owns the platform for effectively everyone (not everyone will own a dev phone). The grandparent post is right, Google might not be all that much better than Apple when it all comes down to it. And I still don't know one person who is sporting an Android based phone.

All wrong. The RIAA is packaging the signals and calling it the next teen rock star invasion. You can't honestly believe that some human is writing that music, can you?

Feasible, but not economically viable I think. Most of the big money venues really only do one thing with the field, and the small money venues don't care enough to drive something this cool.

Although I do like the idea that it might be possible to watch a movie on a football field. Heck, when the team is away, home fans can buy a ticket and watch an HD feed of the game, on the field . Make it a 3D broadcast, and you can double the amount of tickets sold for each game! How cool would it be to watch a baseball game in Wrigley Field in Chicago which is being played at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx NYC? And the display at Wrigley makes it look like the players are actually playing on the field?

Seriously?