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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
