siliconvalley.com — A group calling themselves the Homebrew Computer Club some of the members are veterans from the original club. They are sick of proprietary cell phones, and want to make a highly customizable, open source style phone.
May 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
pockyrevolutionMay 11, 2006
Is Woz in on this?
paulieb13May 11, 2006
If an open source phone company is launched, I'll be on the bandwagon from the beginning. I've been with three different phone companies over the last 5 or 6 years, and have yet to be totally satisfied with my service provider. Being able to customize my phone and service would be a dream come true.
Closed AccountMay 12, 2006
Good luck to them. I bet that just like in the OS market it will lead to far more competition and benefit everyone, not just people that use their phone
osjprMay 12, 2006
who cares
mhamrickMay 15, 2006
No, Woz was not in on this. But we did have a smattering of other original Homebrew Computer Club members attend. But... if Woz or Lee Felsenstein or anyone other HCC members want to show up, I'll make sure they get either a) anonymity or b) public adulation depending on their desires.
mhamrickMay 15, 2006
Ugh... sorry to hear about your RAZR. I wound up with a Moto V330. I'm quoted in the paper as saying modern mobile phones are "horrid pieces of junk." In actuality, I was really only referring to the V330. I have a Sony-Ericsson T610 as my daily driver which I find not completely horrid. In fact, if you added a larger, brighter screen with Zigbee and EDGE radios and the ability to run some version of Squeak on Wombat/L4, I would be very happy with it.
mhamrickMay 15, 2006
Remember that the carriers' business models are pretty much exclusively consumer-oriented. I essentially have no problem with Verizon doing all the "hacker-unfriendly" things they do. It's part of their business model to get people to pay to transfer photos, ringtones and mp3's over the Verizon network. An "open" phone is anathema to them, because people could use them to side-step their restrictions. The real problem I have with this model is that you have this "us" against "them" attitude that springs up where the culture shifts towards one where they (the carrier) automatically define their service offerings as being a pay-per-use unless someone can prove that there's not an effective market for a particular service. Then they start wondering why they should be including a service that can't be monetized.In the end what you wind up with is some product manager's idea for what a phone should be. Fortunately for Verizon Wireless, it's pretty easy to identify what most people want to do with their phones: they want to make phone calls with them. Then there are a few more people who will pay for ring-tones or maybe an MP3 or two. Whatever you think of Verizon's business practices, they _do_ have a fairly wide-spread network. I've seen their voice network place and maintain calls in areas where my poor GSM service provider totally punts.I can't help but think that maybe if they took the attitude that "we really don't know how to represent the buying behavior of a segment of our market" and tried to market "advanced" services to them (for some suitably vague definition of "advanced,") they might find that these users would be happy to hack together solutions from base level services. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Web Services, but if done right, you could have a collection of network services together with phone based components that use these services and a sort of "hypercard for mobile phones" that ran on the phone to provide individual users with the ability of piecing together the technologies that make their applications work.And this is pretty funny because Verizon Wireless, that is trying so hard to be something other than a "common carrier", is pursuing a pricing model on it's non-voice services that sort of discourages their use.