Acidus wrote:
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Mobile providers need to embrace their role as "provider of the tubes" and make their money on charging for packets, not trying to decide what I want those packets to contain.

I don't know what other people's networks are like, but my sprint phone provides the whole internet. Granted, it looks like shit if the site didn't bother to create a page that's formatted for that size screen, but I can open a URL and have it load.

That being said, I don't know that the networks are what they are purely because they want to make money on "walled garden" offerings. Rather, I think it's a non-public acknowledgement that they are in no way capable of providing those "tubes" the way they'd like you to believe. There's a reason sprint barely advertises it's network plans for phones, concentrating instead on the business users with Windows laptops who can get the PC card connection and get their employer to pay for it.

If the price dropped and the interface acted like firefox instead of corralling you into the pre-defined options, the network would come crashing down.

All that being said, I still love it. I can get movie tickets, weather, search google, and I have downloaded Java applications for Gmail and Google Maps, because they are, for the moment, more functional and better designed interfaces (for the phone) than the pure-web alternatives. Thank you google. My phone's Gmaps interface is a gps chip away from being a giant fuck you to garmin, tom-tom, etc. It does the satelite view and everything. Sadly, it's not likely to get that gps chip... maybe my next phone.

RE: Social networking goes mobile