My two pennies are based on our local legislation here in finland. Currently we have 3 large telcos/ISPs, one is the old postal and communications bureau, second is a conglomerate of small local phone companies and third is originally the telco-monopoly phone association of the capital helsinki.

20 years ago mobile phones were crazy expensive and land lines always had a local monopoly behind them. Landline prices were ok i guess, but not cheap. Cheaper if you were associated or investor of your local phone company, many were.

Totally locked situation, each large company had their area and while cable leasing was an option it was usually way too expensive for consumers to even think about - hundreds of dollars worth each month at worst.

Then came new legislation which forced operators to lease copper and fiber at a decent price and suddenly a lot of new ISPs emerged. Some local and small, some from abroad and even municipal or association driven projects. None of the big isps were happy about it, not at all. Service was slow and sluggish and pricing was arbitrary at times. No tools or cable map services were given out to others at first.

So our government had to intervene yet again to force the issue, at least one of the three was threaten with hefty fines to make it worth their while to fix the issues.

And now i can choose an ISP from about 20 different ones, each one having their own merits. Currently i'm using a bit more expensive one (30eur/month 12/2 adsl), but that came with a bonus of a public ip network of my own.

ARM is definitely not comparable to x86 (CISC) cpus because it's a RISC processor. Performance is heavily dependent on software optimization. RISC processors can mimic or emulate x86 instruction set, but it adds another layer of instruction processing when ARM must break down the complex CISC commands to simpler parts suitable for RISC. wikipedia: "RISC /rsk/, is a CPU design strategy based on the insight that simplified (as opposed to complex) instructions can provide higher performance if this simplicity enables much faster execution of each instruction. A computer based on this strategy is a reduced instruction set computer, also called RISC. The opposing architecture is called complex instruction set computing, i.e. CISC."

I hope you do realize that you pay much more than that if you buy the phone sim-locked? The way this works is that if I pay full price for the phone, i can choose whichever operator i wish with minimal costs. And i'm talking about 5 euros per month with next to free phone calls and unlimited data. Oh and sending SMS is 5cents, receiving them is free. 15 euros per month if i want unlimited AND unthrottled data plan.

Jollas concept about "the other half" actually includes plans for keyboard add-on. At first the other halfs (back covers if you like) just change the look, feel and settings of the OS for example red cover for work and blue for home. I haven't tested the phone myself, but this concept sounds cool. Later on Jolla is adding more physical gimmicks to those covers, hardware upgrades, keyboards, etc.