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...)

There are two command line ones, DropBear and OpenSSH, in homebrew.

VNC clients are available, either via PalmOS emulation (they work fine) or via Linux framebuffer apps. Hopefully they'll work on getting X11, which is also available and works with remote X11 protocols, to cooperate with some VNC app soon for those who don't want to run one in "Classic", the emulator.

You were trying to view the desktop Gmail in a mobile browser?? That's bound to have usability issues on any phone. Besides, the email client supports Gmail. Use it. (Mutters about people using browsers for everything.)

There is one major one, has over a thousand apps, patches, and themes. It's called PrewareIn addition, you can load beta apps for the app catalog using Preware or Appscoop, and other feeds you can put into Preware exist, mostly for testing, alternate kernels, and such.

You give up too easily. The PDK allows you to program in C/C++ for it with Linux frameworks - it's more Linuxy then than Android. Or you can develop using ordinary Linux apps Homebrew style, though for display you'll need to install X11 for SDL or program it to use SDL and/or OpenGLES if it's a game using the Homebrew toolkit or the official PDK. Even before they added SDL to the frameworks with firmware 1.3.5, WebOS is recognizably Linux in many ways that Android is not

Maybe for Canada, for USAians, we typically have "unlimited" service which is quite reasonable. Now, if you start running servers or doing a lot of bittorrent, you'll get temporarily capped or even booted off for running a server against your TOS, because upstream bandwidth is rationed, but downloading a radio stream at 128kbps? No problem.

I've never seen anyone use a BASH shell on OpenVMS, fork() on Windows, or anything Unixy other than Qt on Symbian. QNX, on the other hand, is regularly programmed with the Unix API and has a Unix userland as its primary command line interface.

Now, if you define Unix as "has X11 as its main GUI", you'd have to define such Unixes as early SunOS (using NeWS) as non-Unix, and define OS X as non-Unix when it is Unix(r) certified, while such clones as Linux get called Unix...

You are right of course that a real time Microkernel is not the typical kernel on a Unix operating system, but then again, several Unixes were made with microkernels, especially the CMU Mach variety which powered the Unix known as OSF/1, which had a Unix vendor of none other than Digital Equipment (eventually it got named to Tru64, and is still in production by HP after the Compaq merger). Real time variations on Unix have a long history, AT&T even made one. Maybe your definition of the Unix kernel is "something that resembles the 4BSD kernel", mostly because that's what Linux resembles best, but it would be in variance with the certification authorities' definition, which is API, or the common user's definition, which would be what the userland resembles.

Your problem is you're looking for girls on /. There aren't any girls on the internet, much less on slashdot. ;-) I'd recommend trying a matchmaking service in Israel.

I have Israeli friends here in America, simply because they are much like Americans; other than a slight bit of cultural Israeli chutzpah. They even tend to want peace, as many elections, and governments, in Israel have demonstrated. (Yes, even Netanyahu's previous government.) I suspect you, Anonymous Coward, are actually not Jewish at all, and are just using this as a form of the "my best friends are Jewish but..." argument, and have a political axe to grind.