In which case, Burning Man can't police it, as it's not their copyright to enforce. Which means each-and-every single burner will have to try and protect themselves. And not all burners are aware of all the myriad of ways their image could be exploited outside of the Burn.

This lets them centralize protecting attendees. Without getting sign-off from each-and-over person, without miles of paperwork, without random glitches. If you're worried about the organizers turning around and trying to profit from this and generally shutting the burners our from the content they produce... you may have the wrong idea about what Burning Man is, and the dedicated folks who make it happen. Yes, this system depends on benevolent dictators. But if you're attending Burning Man... you've already decided you trust them with *way* more then a random picture or two.

And really - this is something for the burners themselves to bitch about, if they feel it isn't in their interest. And given you're writing this *now* on Slashdot, chances are you aren't at the Burn.

Perhaps I missed something, but the link you supplied to demonstrate why the Panasonic camcorder is overpriced seems to only provides information for 3D still photography, not 3D video. An apples to oranges comparison.

I, too, owned the iPhone for a year and now the G1 for a couple months. I, however, came to the apposite conclusion - I've found the G1 to be an inferior device. I'll address each of your points with my own take.

The battery life is *awful*. I have to charge multiple times a day, and am seriously considering buying an extended battery so I'm not constantly worried about my phone dying just as I need it. The standby time is lousy, and actually *talking* on your phone decimates it.

The GUI is *not* fine. It's inconsistent and lacking polish. No spell-checking, clickable labels behaving differently from application to application, the UI mishmash of using either the touch pad or the mouse, inconsistent and random application of physical back button... And the UI *does* crash - I've had to force my phone off on a couple of occasions to work around a UI lockup. Heck, most of the time the screen doesn't even wake up when I get a phone call, forcing me to deal with even more buttons just to answer the phone.

As for the visual LED that flashes on notifications - perhaps it'd be useful, but the notification system isn't used well by some of the applications and ends up compromising it. Take the IMAP client, for example - if I read the message on another machine (like, say, my home computer), the notification on the G1 isn't updated - the dead entries just sit there. It's hard to trust the notifications when you can't be sure if it's spurious or not.

PF Voicemail a great visual voicemail app? Meh. My iPhone was unlocked and running on T-Mobile, so I never played with it's visual voicemail application. Hence, I can't make a direct comparison. That said, if the iPhone's visual voicemail application is as lackluster as PF Voicemail, it's a shame. The UI in PF is uninspired and feels inconsistent with the rest of the phone. Deleting messages doesn't actually remove them from the main listing - it just flags them red, which makes them seem *more* visually important (compared this to read messages, which are grayed out). Having to remove the messages by navigating to the menu and empty the trash is hockey. And, because it uses an incoming SMS message to update the client, you get junk SMS notifications (since PF apparently can't eat the message).

The Marketplace may let you return apps within 24 hours... but that presumes you can actually buy them. My phone's an unlocked developer edition (ADP1), a device which Google's apparently decided to ban from making purchases from the App Store.

Maybe Google Apps are well integrated - I can't really tell. You see, I use multiple Google accounts - my personal account, my public account (junkmail, shopping, etc), and my work account. And in this case, it works poorly - there's no integration between the multiple accounts, no ability to sign out of one to log into another. Google employees have resorted to installing Maverick, a 3rd party IM client, just so they can at least run an IM that's on a different account. Having integration is of course better then not, so I'm sure the G1 has the upper hand here. But given it doesn't work well for me, I can't claim any personal benefit. And I can't imagine I'm the only person suffering from this particular circumstance.

Sure, the SD card is upgradeable. But what are you going to put on it? You can't install applications to it. Caches aren't written to it. There's no integrated handling of common files like PDFs or ZIPs. And it's not like there's a reasonable media player on there. The darn thing can't even play videos out of the box. I was planning on ordering a larger SD card for the phone, but held-off until I played with it a bit. I'm glad I made that decision - I've barely used 100mbs of the SD card's space. And coupled with the poor battery life, using the phone as a media player would be a awful idea.

As for the mini-USB slot looking like the standard on phones from now on - oh golly, I hope not. Being forced to use an adapter so I can plug in headphones? Terrible.

Perhaps Android will do great things in the future. Maybe later editions of the hardware will be more interesting. But Apple didn't get to use this cop-out for their entry into the market, I'm not happy with the software, and frankly I'm tired of purchasing potential.

I refuse to give the device a free pass just because it's from Google, or that it's got Unix underpinnings. I don't consider the G1 a solid product, and don't recommend it.