This may help explain why some carriers (e.g. T-Mobile) required an "unlimited" data plan for certain phones. Even though my wife only uses about 40 MB of data over T-Mobile's network a month, they want to require her to use the more expensive unlimited plan. If it's an unlimited plan, they aren't charging you for additional data transfer.

Well, technically they might be, but not directly; and not legally. If that's really the reasoning, then they're just extremely evil and bad, bad people.

There are various after-market vendors for at least the major brands in digital SLRs. Even with the newer generation of Canon batteries (e.g. for the 7D) which have special chips to communicate with the camera, at least for the time being, non-smart batteries will at least still work.

Is this ideal, as a consumer? No, it'd be better for consumers if Canon were to release instructions for other manufacturers to communicate in the same way their own batteries do. However, there is sufficient demand for cheaper non-OEM batteries that several companies will sell them, and probably continue to have some available past the life of the camera (I just bought a new round for the 20D, which was replaced by the 30D about six years ago).

Even if the specific batteries are no longer available, the Canon dSLRs can still be powered by AA batteries if you have the hand grip (which I could never imagine shooting without, although I can foresee arguments from people who prefer the smaller size without it).

Pish-posh. I had an iPad device. Work bought me a first-gen model the week they came out, and we've got a number of shared iPad2s for development. I played around with it for a little over a year, using it almost entirely for its Web browser, eMail client/calendar, and the Economist.

The eMail client wasn't particularly great. it was manageable to type on the screen, but it was incredibly frustrating to do certain things, like prune unnecessary parts of a message to which you are replying.

The Web browser was a frustrating experience, especially if the WiFi was at all flaky. If I were following links from an eMail, I'd move between the two applications, and the Web browser would flush its cache when it woke-up, meaning I wouldn't have access to old pages until it was able to download and render them again. Even worse, it could only keep nine pages open at once, so if you had several open to come back to, and you happened to navigate to one that used pop-ups, you were SoL.

I didn't mind the format, and that's why I put up with it for a year. However, depending upon what I plan on doing, I now have two tablets that each work much better than the iPad device did. I have a Nook Simple Touch Reader which works great in daylight situations, and as a reader at night (with K9 mail, the default Android browser, and Opera browsers installed, it's much more reliable than the iPad for those purposes). For situations where eInk doesn't work, or more general browsing and usage I have a HP TouchPad (with a Debian chroot and iceweasel).

Yes, most people won't want to deal with loading an alternative home screen or configure a Debian chroot, but in doing so each are significantly better than the iPad device in my opinion, and together they're still less than a used first-generation iPad device from Apple. Maybe the Apple iPad device is best for you, and makes your life simpler, but objectively saying, from a technical standpoint, that nothing else can touch it disingenuous. (From the aspects of marketing, sales, and mind-share, things are obviously different.)

Buy a dedicated SIP phone.

My parents are running Aastra phones (with wireless handsets).
My fiancée has an ATA (analog telephone adapter) and loves that she can use her old analog phone with it.
You can buy a Grandstream phone for $50 if you don't want something fancy like Aastra or Cisco.

None of these should be harder to use than a normal phone. To initially configure, maybe--but you can do that and then ship them off where all they need to be is connected to the network.

Why bother with a cross-platform software solution? You could, if it simplifies your support issues, I suppose. Each platform has plenty of options if you just need some support however (my father uses Telepathy on his phone).

As I said, my parents have an Aastra phone, which fetches its configuration file from an FTP server (you can also just have it fetch over HTTP/HTTPS) so any configuration changes take effect within a day, or after they restart the phone--including a centralized address book. The Aastra phones are really good if you want a hybrid centralized-decentralized configuration/contact situation and you want to spend a couple hours doing the initial configuration for everyone. The users don't need to know anything special.

> open source software ... ATI card ... (older Nvidia) without glitches.

Since you don't say, and from experience, I'm forced to wonder if you were using ATI's fglrx or Nvidia's proprietary drivers, which would seem to go counter the impression it seems that you're trying to make (open source failed you).

Really there isn't much else to respond to. You don't say what it was that you were using (did you need 3D and compositing? or simply 2D?). I've never come across problems with open drivers just running wmaker or fvwm; and I've run Compiz fine on older Radeon cards (open) and currently on Intel (open) cards.

The biggest problems I've run into was trying to maintain a system using proprietary drivers. I've decided it's just not worth the hassle. Closed drivers in an open system isn't any better than closed drivers in a closed system.

I've noticed Vitelity started offering SMS on their SIP lines. I've not played with it, but would love to hear from people who have (especially if they integrated it with Asterisk). I don't care enough about SMS to play with it right now but am vaguely intrigued about the possibilities of having it integrated into my Asterisk server.

My "everything north of Boston is the same" prejudice shows, but I'm surprised there's UMTS availabe in Maine!