Device support / life

[Ian Stirling]

Elrond wrote:
> Hi all and Wolfgang,
> 
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 08:12:48AM -0700, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
> [...]
>> The second cent is that many folks here are looking at the developer's
>> phone as simply a way of getting the consumer's phone 6 months early.

> 2) P1 phones
> 
>    a) I have not read anywhere, that the P1 phones will be
>       "expect hardware issues" devices. And at least I did
>       not have the impression, that FIC tries to trick us
>       into being their hardware laboratory rats.
> 
>       I really hope FIC will either deliver proper hardware
>       or be kind to people having paid $350.
> 
>       (Warranty is also next corner.)

And assorted consumer rights legislation.

I'm quite willing to have a 'phone' with the software in a broken state.
I'm even happy if it has workaroundable hardware bugs. (Can only use 32M 
flash, bluetooth needs powered up initially with the display off or it 
doesn't work, ...)

Showstopper bugs - for example, idle life of under a day, inability to 
wake on calls, sidetone set so it's not comfortable making calls, not 
charging on a dead battery, ... would lead to me, and I suspect many 
others simply returning the phone, and looking for other hardware to 
develop for.

I can't imagine FIC would do this.

For one very simple reason.

Pissing off the phase 1 devs would be insane.

Even if they take a loss on each and every phase 1 phone, this loss is 
outweighed by a few hours of developer time per phone.


It doesn't take many skilled devs interested in their new toy, and 
playing with coding stuff for it 4 hours a night to write off any 
possible losses.

Even the non-skilled devs that are just buying it for 'toy' value, and 
'I should learn to program/use GTK/...' type reasons, and don't actually 
do any development are still a userbase for the skilled devs, and core 
team, to feed back ideas and bug reports, translate the wiki into 
klingon, and get the software stable by submitting good bug reports.