Can't you buy one from another vendor and use it with verizon? Are you still bound to the phones that come from you mobile phone provider in the US?
That's what I did with my iPhone, I don't have an iPhone contract. Over here in Europe you can even buy them unlocked by Apple (thanks to the legislation in some EU countries). Expensive, but you get around the lousy contract. Regarding OpenSource: Depends on what you want to do. I run all my servers on Ubuntu and I love it for that. Applications...Hm... I've tried - like in REALLY tried, for more than a year - to use OpenOffice professionally. Eventually I gave up and switched to an older MSOffice version (which is more stable than the new ones). My main concern with a lot of OpenSource software is, it's not tested as well as professional software. You know, to test software REALLY, you need testers, not test users, because test users only follow their specific use cases. Symptomatic for this are all new major versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and OppenOffice. Whenever a new version of those come out you can bet, that three days later the first fix comes out for something really essential that got completely broken.... Regarding usability: I like to rate that in "time to success" on a specific task for new and for experienced users (hard to make it right for both). Plus maybe "being not so annoying". And usually, these things REALLY are the hard part. Look at all the discussions around how to do this and that on SqueezeCenter or the SBC. And I swear I spend over 50% of the development time for iPeng just for tweaking those little details. Trying something, testing it, changing it, testing it again... And at least on iPhone, Apple has got that pretty well - I'm not sooo happy with my Mac, there are still quite a few things I like better on Windows (let's start with the horrible keyboard of my MacBook, especially the German layout is close to unusable for development), but iPhone... phew. Had a Symbian smartphone before and the difference is just dramatic. -- pippin --- see iPeng at penguinlovesmusic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55543 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
