Hacking the Razr 3m?

[Chip Marshall]

On February 23, 2007, Ben Scott sent me the following:
> On 2/23/07, Ed Lawson <elawson at grizzy.com> wrote:
> >Verizon ... Razr 3m ... it seems they think it is basically a means to
> >sell me their content as opposed to a phone.
> 
>  FYI, that is exactly the business model they wireless carriers are
> using.  You don't own the phone.  They're nice enough to let you have
> their phone (for a few hundred bucks).  But you can't use their phone
> in ways they don't like.  And they'd like you to pay for every button
> press (although they haven't been able to get away with that yet).
> For a while, Nextel wanted to charge you for *every picture* you
> transferred off their camera phones.

This is one of the reasons I'm very happy with my Treo 700p PDA/phone.
I get to just run plain Palm OS software without being limited to
whatever Verizon wants to push at me, and I can sync with anything that
can talk to a Palm device without having to buy special software and
special cables and stupidly high prices.

Hopefully things like OpenMoko and potentially the iPhone will catch on
in the future and we'll see a shift away from cell phones being seen as
something controlled by the phone company that we have to ask their
permission to use, and more like personal data devices that just happen
to make phone calls too.

-- 
Chip Marshall <chip at 2bithacker.net>     http://kyzoku.2bithacker.net/
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