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A rant against the SmartPhone ecosystem.

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mahesh2k:
They did it already ...I guess i was few days late to get this news  ;D

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC603LL/A
--- End quote ---

Eóin:
I was thinking unlocked as in jailbroken, doh :-[

superboyac:
I was thinking unlocked as in jailbroken, doh :-[
-Eóin (October 17, 2011, 03:35 PM)
--- End quote ---
I will freak out the day Apple actually formally allows unhindered access to their OS files/folders.

Renegade:
The lock-down in iOS is more than just with carriers.

The API itself is locked. This is true for a lot of APIs with different mobile OSes. Some make sense while others do not.

For example, on bada, you must have Samsung's permission to use certain APIs because they are sensitive and expose personal information or they consume a service that has to be regulated to make sure that it maintains operations.

So some things make sense to lock down.

On iOS, the media library is locked with no file access at all. Zero. So you cannot open, for example, an MP3 file that is in the user's library. At all. Instead, you have to use their player API to access the media library through URLs. So, if you are interested in using a pre-made crappy player, then it's ok. If you want to do anything, you're hosed.

This is not reasonable. They could very easily simply make the media library read-only. But they don't.

The extent to which iOS is locked-down is just nutty.

"Oh, but somebody could write a program that gets around DRM and..."  :-\

I don't see Apple changing things.

Remember, Apple only opened up hardware access on OS X within the last year to allow Adobe to get certain things running properly instead of having to do it all in software, which wasn't working very well.

Inside the walled garden of iOS, there are more walled gardens...

JavaJones:
Do you all actually agree with what this person is saying? It's retarded. ARM is a generalized CPU architecture, based on RISC, that essentially has as much flexibility as x86. All the components that go into your average smart phone or tablet are no less capable of end-user update/modification/whatever than their PC counterparts *except* when it comes to *physical* upgrade. But in this sense they are much like a laptop. Few laptops let you switch out the graphics card or CPU, for example.

This person seems to be making the argument that because ARM CPUs and the related hardware used to be used almost exclusively in embedded devices that were entirely "managed" (i.e. the end user is not in control), that this is the way it *must* be. That this is somehow intrinsic to the hardware, or even the software/OS. iOS as one example, yes it's built with "lock down" in mind, but this is a conscious choice, and the mere fact you can jail break shows that the fundamental underlying OS is not so deeply locked down that it's not relatively easy to bypass. In other words the lock down is a layer on top of the OS. True "locked down" systems are embedded and actually have only the minimal functions necessary to support their intended purpose. iOS is relatively general-purpose, as is Android (also running on ARM).

In short, there is noting intrinsic to the hardware or software that makes things this way. In the case of Android that is especially so. Look at "Google Experience" devices and you see they're pretty open; look at the Cyanogen ROMs and similar Android OS branch releases and you can see it even more so. There is tremendous power, flexibility, and openness possible. It's the carriers and, I think to a somewhat lesser extent, the hardware manufacturers that demand lock-down. This is a business problem, not a technical one.

The whole quote seems painfully ignorant to me. Am I missing something?

- Oshyna

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