And buy a new cable every few months?

I've had several cables whose plastic clippy endy things have snapped off, including ones with rubber covers. They still work but you have to hold the cable in place, rather than the satisfying click that normally accompanies inserting the cable.

That's just from carrying the cable in a laptop bag and plugging it in each day.

Elop.

Well back when Symbian was king and before Kickstarter, there was a phone platform for tinkerers - Neo 1973/Freerunner.

Suffice to say it died. A main reason was software - few people wanted to pay for a half-finished platform. Today, numerous alternatives exist to windows phone and iOS. e.g. Android, Sailfish, Tizen, Firefox OS.

So a feasible crowd-funded project might be to hire, full time, a few kernel hackers to write blob replacements for replicant and integrate the free GPU efforts of rpi/lima/freedreno. Outsourcing the hardware to ZTE and Geeksphone, based on schematics from the Google/Moto modular smartphone project Ara.

Didn't I write "language family"?

'Polynesian' is language family spoken in various Pacific countries such as New Zealand (Maori), USA (Hawaiian) and Chile(Rapa Nui).

The release number aligns with the AOSP release, i.e. Replicant 4.2 targets Jelly Bean.

Not if you set it to flight mode.

there are very, very few applications that could possibly warrant the development of a new widget set, but that a web browser is certainly among them.

There is only XUL.

I think what the poster is saying is that Palm went back to the drawing board after seeing iOS 1.0

webOS, according to vocal Palm Pre users on here, was more intuitive but launched later after iPhone had made an impact.

cue the soylents...

Their website has been sold out already. Oops! Seems like the new boss wanted a quick profit.

http://soylentnews.org/article...

I thought that was the point of compulsory superannuation. Entrust 10%, or thereabouts, of your pay packet to a benevolent fund manager to invest on your behalf for 40 years.

Within 3 generations, aged pensions could be eradicated, all the while lining the pockets of the 'right' that own the financial institutions.

Or so goes the theory...

Perhaps you can use those in the upcoming Scottish war of independence...

Yep, if Microsoft's Surface Pro paradigm ever seriously threatened the iPad, Cupertino would be out with a hybrid OS at the next annual developer conference.

One OS to rule them all, Windows 8.x, is a strategy MS have copped flack for. But if there's one company that could pull it off, it's Apple with their design sensibilities as viewed through the reality distortion field.

Apple have already reskinned parts of OS X for touch - e.g. iWork and Safari, so there's enough commonality to port useful programs between platforms. The app stores are in place, what's needed is a unified API, a common subset of OS X and iOS, that deprecates any 'legacy' NextSTEP code from the 80s. They've migrated developers before with Classic and Carbon.

Running Windows apps in VM alongside Android?

arm v7 provides virtualization extensions - allowing one to host OSes via qemu or Xen.

I haven't seen the equivalent of Virtualbox in Google Play yet though.