'Phones are boring!'

Ari Jaaksi attended an Open Source in mobile conference and felt that the participants had it wrong.

"Cell phones exist in a very restricted ecosystem. Phones that you can buy today are closed; they include features, such as SIM locks, walled garden browsers, DRMs, MMS's, and other stuff desired by the ecosystem but ignored or hated by end users"

He's right, but if you put Linux on a phone it should open things up. Maybe we can have hardware without locks, that just takes a SIM card and lets you do whatever you want.

I think, the same as Ari, that we should be envisioning different sorts of device, not just phones.
I'd like to see the voice & keypad separated from the rest of the device. What I really need is a server/router, with a bunch of devices for gaming, voice (a phone), extra storage (pNAS- tm :) and a keyboard.
If I just want to travel light, i take the voice part and the router.

The router can do things like,
- pull down my email
- convert MMS to email
- upload photos to Flickr etc
- sync with a directory on my home server
- provide remote access to a fixed PC
- forward calls to some device I am using
- publish my location/presence to authorised subscribers etc

The beauty of putting Linux on the mobile platform (whatever that is, and it also applies to MS Windows) is that applications will come thick and fast, breaking through the walled garden and making the mobile internet the same as the 'fixed' internet.

I'd put money on it...