Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

That's one of my biggest gripes about the iPhone (and the Kindle and others). The provider can retroactively disable/delete items you've purchased and use at any time. Apple decides they want only Safari on "their" device line, they can not only stop selling the alternatives, but can disable it on any device that connects to the network & syncs up. This happened on the Kindle too, when they irronicly pulled several Wells titles off people's devices, including 1984. :)

With the N900, I can make a snapshot of just about anything and restore it back, without fear of Nokia deciding what is and isn't allowed on my device.

WRONG! Sharing copyrighted material without the authors consent is illegal. There at plenty of small start-up bands out there that encourage people to share their music to drum up support. There are some that release whole albums or a select number of tracks for free to spread their sound. MC Lars (among others) has promoted in this way in the past, with one track titles "Download this Song", where he give permission to share the song with others for free right in the lyrics of the song.

The concept that sharing, in general, is illegal and shouldn't be supported is a real crime. Some people actually do things not for profit, but because they enjoy doing it, and want the fruits of their labor to be shared by others. Disabling that wholesale because another group of people is using it for criminal activity is ludicrous. It would be like making cars illegal because so many people are killed every year by cars, when clearly that's not the primary use or intent of a car.

No, but I think any time you can add something of interest to the thread it's good, and frankly, as a developer, I found those details interesting. :)

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

Only for copyrighted content. IMO no reason to block the functionality entirely.

EDIT: woody beat me to the punch ^^ like he said

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

So we are going to gt into the legalities of sharing mp3s now? For te most part, it is illegal. There is no way for the phone to filter illegal and legal music being shared. Rather than be an enabler, Apple has chosen not to. Especially when sharing music defeats the purpose of the iTunes store.

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

Well, I had to add the words "out of the box" meaning that you can buy an app later, but it cannot do so at the moment of purchase.

Just being fair since that was something complained about elsewhere about the N900 since it cannot also, at time of purchase, edit those files but something can be installed later to do so.

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

A correction is needed. They might have pulled those apps from the app store, but they didn't pull those apps from my machine. I still have them, can still use them and when I back up my machine, it'll be back on next restore.

I will just not get any updates. Only Amazon has deleted from the machine.

This has never happened, not to my knowledge. Care to site a source of this happening?

And they got sued and people won and got the media back.

Same on the iPhone. I still have apps that have been since pulled and use them. I just don't get any updates whatsoever.

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

How is that better than the opposite?
I personally dislike the iPhone (and AT&T in the US). But I am a very happy Mac user.

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

Not true. Maybe for YOU it's illegal for the most part, but frankly far more "illegal" file sharing happens PC to PC than phone to phone. It's not the job of a device manufacturer or OS provider to police what people do on/with the device.

Also, Apple had a way of doing it with iTunes. In fact that was one of their huge selling points in getting permission from the labels initially to start selling songs in iTunes, that it could retain/control/prevent illegal copying of the files because of their DRM format. Once they had the market pretty sealed up, they eventually dropped the strict DRM stuff, but they still can tell what was store bought an what wasn't. There are settable flags in most file formats that indicate if the file is copyright or not, and most people don't know how to change those.

Not allowing files to be shared or copied has nothing to do with legality from a device perspective. If someone copies files illegally from a PC to another PC over the internet, nobody is going to sue Microsoft for allowing the PC to have a copy function (not even in the US where frivolous lawsuits are the norm).

That is the real reasoning here. Sharing anything defeats Apples ability to make a profit. Technically, one can copy a file from their PC (via iTunes), to a device, and play it in two places at once, both on the device and on their home PC. Technically, that's a violation of the agreement you have on purchasing the song, since you only purchased on copy. Apple doesn't care about legal technicalities. They care about selling stuff and making money. Small bands sharing their songs for free, or free open source audio books (like Librivox) don't make Apple money, so they make it all the harder to share such things. It's all about the money.

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

You're correct in that they haven't done it yet to anything but a few malware apps. The fact that they could do it though is disturbing to me.

I'm betting Android wished it had such a mechanism, when the rouge banking app hit it's store. :)


The reason the media was pulled was because they found out that the group selling the media in fact did not have the publishing rights to do so. They settled a couple months later, after they had the proper publisher in place and could restore the media to people who purchased it earlier. If that had not reached that agreement with the publisher, I doubt the settlement would have included the media restore happening on the Kindle.

Still, Amazon says it reserves the right to pull media from the Kindle in certain circumstances, even after the 1984 fiasco. And has retroactively updated their terms of service to reflect that. (Amazon is our friend, Amazon has always been our friend.)

Still... the fact that there is no built in mechanism in the N900 to prevent the use of any software (remotely or otherwise) is a key item to me.

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

Every week, The Economist lets me download a spoken-word version of its current issue in mp3 format. Are you saying that is illegal?

Re: Simple stuff iphone should do and N900 does
 

I like IPhone. it has great look and very nice shape.
However, i really dont like the way Apple and AT&T doing their business in US including verizon. BullSit
Apple using dirty trick to publicize their Iphone 4g. (their employer forgot iphone 4g at a bar)
Verizon seeling phone that using CDMA ..no Sim.
I bought Motorola droid on Motorola offical site..and they sent me Motorola droid for verizon. So mistakable because i live in US.
I made them a call and say because i live in Us. they cant send me any different version of droid like milestone.