JavaJones is right!

(...)"lock down"(...)is a conscious choice

-JavaJones (October 17, 2011, 07:57 PM)

ARM, as many architectures out there, are quite open and so are their possibilities. Yes, some upgrades can be hard or end badly. Many times it's not even fault of "the upgrade" but of "the upgrader" who messed it up along the way. And on the other hand, many users will actually live in a somehow "locked-down mode" as they won't care much about installing many/any apps or upgrading their OS.

I certainly don't want the UPS guy to hack his handheld, and yes, it doesn't belong to him but to UPS's process.

On the other hand, I paid for my smartphone to use it as I want. And yes: it IS a personal computer; maybe as personal as it gets. I want to hack it and the architecture is up for the challenge. If it's not, it should be. So, if you are up to the task and aware of the risks, hack away!

I mainly use my phone to make phone calls ... because, it's a phone.

-Stoic Joker (August 02, 2011, 02:47 PM)

My $0.02: if it's a phone, then it IS a phone, but if it's a "smartphone" I think it's not exactly a phone. Having used PDAs (Palms) for long before cellphones were a must for most, I firmly believe that the smartphone is the come of age of the PDA, and one crucial reason for its success is the inclusion of a phone in it. So no, PDAs are NOT dead, and a smartphone is not a phone, it's the ACTUAL personal computer that you carry around to do many things... placing phone calls, for example.

If you read above or ask around, you'll see "I mainly use my phone to read books / read news / listen to music / IM / Twitter...". So no, it's not (only) a phone.

Inkscape http://www.inkscape.org/ could be worth a try. It is open source freeware. A Desktop publishing program with a raster to vector utility (Potrace) now built in.

-David1904 (August 20, 2010, 05:06 PM)

I am a faithful user of Inkscape, and its raster to vector utility is pretty decent.