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A rant against the SmartPhone ecosystem.

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Carol Haynes:
FWIW I recently threw out a 1980s PC based entirely on an ARM chip - it had been sitting up in my roof for years unused and unwanted and it finally took its last trip to the dump.

In its day it was a brilliant PC - it was the birthplace of the Xara graphics package (not called Xara in those days - changed its name when it was ported to Windows) and Impression (a brilliant DTP package by the same authors as Xara - I still miss Impression).

In those days ARM stood for Acorn RISC Machine - Acorn being the British company that developed RISC architecture in PCs, it ran an OS called RiscOS - which provided many features for Bill G and Steve J to steal for their products.

Unfortunately a small UK company developing PCs primarily for the education market had no chance of surviving but the ARM chips were salvaged by a consortium of companies (including Acorn who are still involved).

There is nothing about ARM chips specific to handheld devices that require a 'managed' environment it is purely a limitation imposed by manufacturers of handhelds for greed!

Renegade:
The whole quote seems painfully ignorant to me. Am I missing something?
-JavaJones (October 17, 2011, 07:57 PM)
--- End quote ---

Well, yes and no.

The specifics of the ARM deal is a bit silly as you point out. However, the general mentality that goes into embedded devices, like in the FedEx example, is being carried over in part to consumer devices. That's the part where the beef is. The "walled garden" of the embedded world is spilling over into what has traditionally been a pretty free world in the consumer-computing space. So, that's where the discontent is. Or at least as I read it.

For the technical details, as you stated, yeah... Can't argue with you there.

This is a business problem, not a technical one.
--- End quote ---

Boom! Nailed it!  :Thmbsup:

Eóin:
One thing I really do wonder about is how warranties would work if phones shipped unlocked. For example once you root an android phone you can overclock the cpu with ease. You can also do things like mess with drivers and just generally push the hardware beyond it's limits.

Asking a company to replace an entire phone because you burnt it out messing with cpu voltages feels difficult to justify.

Renegade:
One thing I really do wonder about is how warranties would work if phones shipped unlocked. For example once you root an android phone you can overclock the cpu with ease. You can also do things like mess with drivers and just generally push the hardware beyond it's limits.

Asking a company to replace an entire phone because you burnt it out messing with cpu voltages feels difficult to justify.
-Eóin (October 18, 2011, 04:00 AM)
--- End quote ---

True. It's little different than purchasing a sailboat, then running it aground trying to sail up a shallow river and complaining about it. They're not meant for rivers. Overclocking has it's hazards, and it's not fair to put those concerns on the manufacturer.

Using any product beyond its specified operating range should render the warranty void.

Computers are a tough situation because you have both hardware and software to think about. I can't say as I'd blame HTC if I put on some OS and things got messy. But if I'm using their stock OS and all that, then that's a different story.

Eóin:
Following the forums I've heard reports that HTC run a kind of don't ask, don't tell policy. If you void your warranty installing custom roms they still tend to repair genuine hardware faults like a faulty screen which weren't related to your software messing.

But that's not an official policy.

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