Introduction
I am the
very happy owner of a HTC Desire smart phone. It is a lovely beast that does everything rapidly and with grace. The HTC Desire runs Android v2.2 (a Linux spin-off) and it does this well. Yet the Internet is full of websites where people discuss whether the HTC Desire can be rooted or not (whether the owner of the phone can get full control of his phone or not). That made me think. I confident that others have thought pretty much the same that I have, but I’d like to share my thoughts nonetheless.
My idea is this:
What if smart phones were optionally sold without an operating system?What if we hackers, tweakers, and nerds could buy a smart phone without any operating system and then install whatever operating system we fancied on the phone? And what if the vendors, nudge Google, could get into their thick, mostly empty heads that we users are getting more and more advanced for each passing generation and that we want full control over our equipment and that we do not like arbitrary limitations such as the limitations that exist on what widgets you can install on your Android-based smart phone (you can’t install commercial widgets on non-US Androids, I think). Most of us Android users know about Market Enabler: A small, nifty tool that enables download and installation of
all Android widgets, not only the ones that Google deem appropriate for our location.
So, what I am saying is this:
- The phone vendors out there should get together and create a hardware standard for smart phones. A hardware standard that was generic and supported all of the feasible features that could ever be envisioned (I lack a thermometer in my smart phone!).
- The phone vendors out there should sell their operating systems like Microsoft sells Windows: In OEM versions, retail versions, and development versions.
- The phone vendors should start working towards a standard API and tool chain for their OS’es.
- The phone vendors should abandon all habits of creating arbitrary locks and limitations in their OS’es.
Then just sit back and wait for a few years and you’ll have a smart phone environment that resembles the Windows environment: Tens of thousands of great apps that run well on virtually any smart phone out there. Ideally, it would be the Android platform that took this role, but then Google/HTC/etc. need to figure out that it is
not their job to decide which widgets we users can and cannot buy – give us them all!
Keyboards and Mice¶
Personally, I can't wait until the day that you can buy a two-port USB-to-microUSB adapter and attach a standard keyboard and a standard mouse to your Android phone. That would basically mean that you could take your phone and your adapter with you and use your phone as a lightweight computer whenever you can borrow or use a standard USB keyboard and a standard USB mouse. I think it would be so cool to be able to do your mobile computing tasks on an Android phone. Down the road, the concept of
personal computing would be altered radically so that everybody had their computer (their smartphone) with them at all times and then borrowed keyboard, mouse, and perhaps a display from whoever they visited.