I realize there are many reasons why a person would need or want to do all the great things that are being discussed here and that's fantastic. But can I really be the only one who just uses his cell phone for making and receiving phone calls? I know this is /. and the discussion is about advanced phones, but I'm getting the vibe that everyone here thinks a phone without apps or touch screens or internet or feature #9 is somehow inferior. Is there anybody else here that still uses a plain Jane featureless phone?

I live in Las Vegas and can definitively say that OTA TV is of much higher quality than cable (Cox). I was going to get cable when I recently bought a new 1080p LCD, but when I hooked up my old rabbit ears and saw how much better the picture was compared to my friends with cable I decided to stick with the antenna. Every channel has excellent reception and every major show including local news is in 16:9 1080i. On top of that, a few of the local channels run dedicated weather and traffic stations 24/7 on their subchannels which aren't available via cable.

Wouldn't it work to show photos of easily identifiable objects and have people type in what they see? Dog, cat, house, pencil, etc. I guess the image sizes could be cataloged and answers could be generated from that. Random on-the-fly compression rates might work.