On Sun, Aug 17, 2008, Erez D wrote about "open phone (is openmoko the only option ?)": > i have a Nokia N95 8GB. on the paper it is a great phone (if you look at the > hardware spec) > however the MMI/software sucks bigtime (like most phones on the market).
This issue is unfortunately not specific to Nokia N95, or to phones. I recently got myself a "Creative Zen", a movie and music player (what is colloquially knowns as an mp4 player). Using this player is a continuous experience of cognitive dissonance: The hardware is fantastic, one of the best I ever saw: a crisp and clear screen, small and light (but the screen is large enough to be enjoyable), long (enough) battery life, good headphones, etc. It's also very cheap (just 90$). It's a real joy to watch movies in bed, or listen to music, with this player. But the software is terrible - one of worst I ever saw. I need to reset the device (something which requires to find a pin...) at least once a day. At least half of the movie files need complicated tricks to play, and some still play badly (e.g., the audio sync drifts). It uses some propriatary Microsoft protocol to connect to the computer, which doesn't work (properly) on Linux. If you look on vendor sites (e.g., Amazon.com) you'll also see that the reviews are very bimodal: many people love this player (giving it 5 stars) and many people hate it (giving it one star), and almost nobody in the middle. So the thought comes to mind: What can Creative possible gain by keeping this software? If the software became better with zero added cost, we would get a great $90 player, which will beat hands-down all other players in the market (because most of them are either not as good, or much more expensive). And making their software a free-software project sounds like a great way to get this software improved, with very little cost to them. I think the situation here is even simpler than with phones: With phones, the makers (like Nokia) always hidden incentives (like getting paid directly by the network operators, and in exchange making it hard for you to do things without paying the operators hefty fees), and also government regulations and other issues. None of these issues exist with media players. Even the patent issues are non-existant (I assume that Creative already pay the patent licenses for mp3 and so on, so it should have no problem to run free software that plays mp3, for example). -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Aug 18 2008, 17 Av 5768 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Cats aren't clean, they're just covered http://nadav.harel.org.il |with cat spit. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
