Sean's impact being felt...

[Shawn Rutledge]

I was wondering if Apple negotiated something... they have an
exclusive with Cingular for the current iPhone but maybe it doesn't
prevent them from also selling a different phone for CDMA.  And maybe
they just don't like being exclusive, and wanted to have control of
their own marketing/branding, so they insisted on the CDMA phone being
unlocked.  Not that that would require Verizon to be an open network
necessarily, but it could be related somehow...

Oh and the Amazon Kindle is on the CDMA network too.  Hmmm.
Apparently CDMA can be very low-power, somehow.

Anyway it seems to be a big change; always GSM has been the more open
network just because you can put your SIM in any compliant phone
without asking first, whereas to switch a different phone onto your
Verizon account, you have to go through an activation process.  Even
still, how could that change?  They might just be less picky about
which phones they will activate, but activation would still have to
occur.

The talk about virtualizing SIMs is kindof ironic in that the
existence of the SIM card, and the fact that GSM is a global standard,
has been a force pushing towards openness of phones.  If every network
required "activation", it would be very hard for the OpenMoko project
to exist.  Personally I switched a couple years ago after I realized
what a mistake it was to be on Verizon, because GSM is where the
action is.  Now that may change, and EVDO is so attractive after
all...

Anybody working on porting Linux to any existing CDMA phones?  Like
the Moto Q maybe?

Speaking of the Kindle, another fun project would be to create a
combination phone/ebook reader, with a large (roll-up?) eInk display.
But there is such a huge price gap between the eInk developer kits and
the actual devices; they don't make it very easy to get started.  It
would be much cheaper to hack an ebook than to build a new one.

On Nov 28, 2007 10:22 AM, William Weinberg <bilzinho at pacbell.net> wrote:
> That's terrific news, but short term, OpenMoko and most other open
> efforts have limited access to the Verizon network, which is 100% CDMA.