Part 2, which no one has mentioned is that the Open Source people still have little to no respect for the kind of attention-to-detail design that a device like the iPhone displays. If the dream is to rival Apple in the marketplace (or the mindspace) then we need devices that are as awesome to use for people WHO DON’T CARE that there are no user-serviceable parts inside. THIS IS MOST PEOPLE.

Start up a viable open-source team that has as many designers as programmers and is user-experience focused in a radical way.

Google Android?

If not, then gleeful and unrestrained hacking is the grinder’s only chance, as other comments unanimously put it.

Excellent write-up once again, Kevin. May you sleep better in the future ;)

So with a fake UK account, I am allowed to use the “Genius” functionality in my supposedly “free” iTunes music software. Not only that, now I have to pay up for an upgrade, without which all the cool apps coming out wont work.

I know they have a business to run, but its evil if you look at it in this way.

I have the LG VU, and I honestly think the biggest leg up the iPhone has on it is simply that more people are looking at it, and therefore developing for it. Well, that and it seems to have an aneurysm if you try to install more than 4 gigs of storage.

I’ve found some modding sites for the VU and similar phones, and picked up a data cable, but no one seems to be doing a whole lot more than cosmetic modding, whereas I’d like to find out, say, how to have it use any open network for data instead of paying AT&T through the nose for that capability. Or any number of things that aren’t just font and skin changes. It’s all about how these things are viewed, though. If no one’s seeing it as something that can do awesome things, something worth the effort, no one’s going to even bother trying.

The iPhone only just caught up with it’s feature-set when they released the 3GS. Though I *do* envy their built-in compass for it’s AR possibilities.

There are, in my opinion, far better phones than either mine of the iPhone out there that have been released over the past year. Society just needs to stop collectively wetting it’s pants over Apple, while it’s competitors need to step up their promotion. THEN we’ll get options, and with options come things that we can actually fiddle with without Steve Jobs slapping our wrists.

What, programming or hardware-wise, is to stop folks from getting bricked older models, gutting them, and reverse-engineering them into tiny laptop-like devices with a more standard wireless connection? I mean, other than that people on EBay still seem to think they’re worth a couple hundred bucks as shiny, white paperweights?

The world we live in is the one we create

Granted, the principle of openness could be crafted into a compelling message that might slowly challenge these closed cultures, but that’s an eternal vigilance problem – we’d have to have to resources to push our message on a similar scale, push it hard, and keep pushing it. If we were really capable manipulators, we could try dressing it up in religious clothes, but again, that’s not something a small group of hackers can easily do (though I’m always for starting a cult of technology).

This is all just paraphrasing of the old maxim “show, don’t tell”. Open source and future friendly systems and devices need to beat closed systems at their own game. We have to design systems, devices, whatever it is we design to be more usable, more focused, more elegant, more aesthetically pleasing, and with not necessarily more features, but better and more applicable features.

So, what can we do? Design stuff. Make stuff. Publicize everything we do. Help each other make stuff. Get past ego – it’s not about designing things to make one person or one subgroup look awesome, it’s about designing things to help us all move forward. Hack things. Publish our hacks. Design our creations to work together. Establish open de facto standards before the big corporates come in and foist closed ones upon us. Put every good idea in the commons, and make that commons so visible that patent inspectors can’t help but notice it. Encourage our children.

Some of that’s really practical, some of that’s philosophical. I think both are necessary – ideology without designs is just pretentious pap, design without ideology is all to easily co-opted by the greedy.