Freedom on your mobile phone

[saurav]

Re: Freedom on your mobile phone

Hmm.... I was confused by this: -

.... I think we can hook up a smartphone to a keyboard, mouse, monitor and speakers to create a more "traditional" computer. ...

That's called "tethering". Verizon will block it unless you pay them $20/mo for the "privilege".

[GreyGeek]

Re: Freedom on your mobile phone

AT&T says "Our goal here is fairness for all of our customers."

Translation: you are smart enough to install a tethering app on your phone and your laptop, and make them communicate so that the smartphone acts like an ISP modem, but other, less technically capable users, cannot. So, we are going to charge both groups and extra $20/4Gb/mo "just to be fair". They already charge $80/10Gb/mo, so, it is effectively double billing, making it unmitigated greed, because they are already charging for a "data plan". It should make little difference to them HOW you eat up your allotted monthly data. IF they could meter air and charge you to breath, they would.

Sprint now blocks tethering on its network.

"Tethering" is the use of your cell phone as a modem for another device, usually a notebook or PDA. The connection is made either with a cable (USB or serial) or, most often, wirelessly through bluetooth. An application or CDMA script dials #777 to make the data connection, which tells your smartphone service provider that you are setting up a "dial up" connection, and then acts as the tunnel between your smartphone and your laptop. All they have to do to block tethering is reject #777 calls from your smartphone during authentication (logging in).

[saurav]

Re: Freedom on your mobile phone

Yes, I use tethering too, and the tariff we have here for our data plans are dirt cheap compared to what you all are quoting but then again, the connections hardly ever work satisfactorily. Anyway, what I was thinking about is connecting a phone to all necessary computer accessories (mice and keyboards and monitors and stuff) and creating a "real" computer out of it. How would that compare with an "ordinary" computer?

[wizard10000]

Re: Freedom on your mobile phone

Well, I'm a geek but not a phone geek.

This past February I replaced my trusty but aging Verizon Razr v3m with an LG Octane, which ain't a smartphone (I called it a stupidphone). Earlier this week I replaced said stupidphone with a new old stock Verizon Razr v3m I got off eBay for $50 shipped - the extended battery and battery cover cost me another $20

It does kinda irritate me that I had to use a Windows machine to reenable a few of the features Verizon shut off, but I do no SMS at all, have a fairly well-connected netbook for internet access and all I really want is to be able to make calls, maintain an address book on my PC and have something that's fairly easy to carry.

Ergonomically I think the Razr's the best flip phone out there, my last one lasted almost four years and with an extended battery mine will run for a week with bluetooth enabled. Voice recognition through my Blackberry-branded car kit is great, the thing fits in my pocket and I don't have to worry about scratching up the glass.

Anyway, like I said I'm a geek but I guess I'm not a phone geek

[wizard10000]

Re: Freedom on your mobile phone

ps - my phone's startup screen:



my shutdown screen:



and my phone's wallpaper:

[kjjjjshab]

Re: Freedom on your mobile phone

I never understood the point of the iphone or any of these smartphones. The screen is so small, why would you want to watch videos or browse the web from it?...

Don't use a web browser on a cell phone... too many flash ads, frames, other slowly loading distractions... instead, just use an rss reader - it works great. I open a browser on Android about once a month, but check all my favorite websites daily/hourly with rss.

CyanogenMod is the ubuntu of Android roms... then you have to put LauncherPro on it to get kubuntu!

[saurav]

Re: Freedom on your mobile phone

CyanogenMod is the ubuntu of Android roms... then you have to put LauncherPro on it to get kubuntu!

Very well said! Very well said indeed!