If phones were designed to please their owners, rather than corporations

4 Likes

Some days, you strike me as very insightful, and philosophically self-consistent.

Other days, I sigh and hope you have a really dedicated Sancho Panza/Dr. Watson following you around.

8 Likes

Today I’ve been an utter prat! My day was derailed yesterday and I have not slept much.

At times, being a picayune pedantic is no pic-a-nic! It’s treading water as I try rebooting my personality.

2 Likes

It’s p-… Never mind…

9 Likes

If you think your [or in this thread, perhaps I should say "most peoples’] iPhone, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry isnt guilty of the same crime, you’re delusional.

2 Likes

Android can at least be easily-ish rooted, things can be sideloaded (and “nondeletable” vendor crap deleted), small vendors with less serious cases of megacorporatosis can (and do) make phones around it. All together it is a lesser evil.

3 Likes

Wouldn’t a viable legal and political strategy need to be designed first — before phones could be designed to please their owners, rather than corporations? U.S. courts permit corporate abuse of warranties to constrict phone ownership rights instead of expanding them.

Do you think it wouldn’t go the way of more regulatory capture, given the hold the telcos and their lobbyists have on the govts?

Just free the specifications, legally or not, unlock the phones, again legally or not, and make simple easy to use modules that can be assembled together, and support e.g. Cyanogenmod and other alternative ROMs.

We can have the ownership rights. We just have to reach and take them.

2 Likes

Only if you live in China. You will have customs delays.

You’ll have them even when shipping from the US. And more likely there, as Chinese vendors are customer-friendly and more likely to undervalue the shipment.

1 Like

I thought that the primary thing preventing phones from pleasing their user was this stupid patent trolley.

5 Likes

Most of my non-Nokia phones over the past 12+ years have come from China - starting with the old Motorola Linux-based touchscreens.

One nice thing that makes foreign phones a better option nowadays is that some of the newer chipsets support almost all the frequency variations used worldwide (not just 3 or 4 “international” bands) e.g. the Intel chipset in the Zenfone 2 - you just need some clever folks to figure out how to enable them.

2 Likes

Yes, and “taking” those rights in that context rests on previous shared legal and political work to secure free and open licensing.

The current right to boot a phone with new iterations of GNU/Linux depends on both the prior technical success of booting a PC with an unlicensed OS and on then successfully licensing and sharing the code over time.

The social work was necessary to win sufficient legal and political legitimacy to defend future free use of software code, for e.g., on a phone.

There are other areas of politics and law which need similar work. The law of consumer warranties is one of those areas. Warranties are too often abused to regulate general purpose computers as though they were only for-profit appliances.

1 Like

@popobawa4u You have been flagged something like 16 times today! Please don’t make us moderate at the weekends! DIAL IT BACK. And go to bed.

4 Likes

“Bob” is not the answer. And neither is anything else!

I ate the confusion. Stay on topic.

2 Likes

Making your own phone is fairly easy. The radio modules need to function with current service providers, but most of them seem to take commands via serial, not unlike a modem. The rest of whatever form-factor, computer, and UI can be practically anything.

What I think can revolutionize mobile phones are DIYing the network side. Community-made and operated cells are more difficult, and where the possibilities become interesting.

2 Likes

Strangely, most folks aren’t interested in this. They just want to make phone calls.

What they are interested in, even those who don’t know it, is more competition and more options.

OpenBTS software, software-defined radio. The difficulty of the cell-side is high but dropping rapidly; rigging up a cell with rudimentary spoof/attack capabilities is a one-man affair these days, see various Youtube security demos.

The interconnection with the network will be a problem, but SIP and Asterisk can be of assistance there, so you can have a local cell or couple cells with coverage of a limited area, and ability to call out and be called from the outside. If your phone has two SIMs, you can have a fallback to an expensive large-area operator.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.