But it's sad that people will buy hardware that conspires against them to make their life difficult. If you really want a "jailbroken" phone, why not support companies that are making that functionality available voluntarily?
If any part of you cares about usability, or about gorgeous interfaces, or about incredible design, then you can't go with any phone other than the iPhone. There's no competition. The Pre is the closest thing there is, but even it's not at all close.
Apple as a company has thoroughly nitpicked its designs. Some people don't notice - you seem like you're the type not to be anal about design. For the people that live for design, the iPhone is something of a miracle. I can't think of many things that are as beautiful as the iPhone.
Most people are somewhere between me and you. Some people don't want many features, but they want the things they've got to be gorgeous; other people don't notice the little blips in design and stick to phones that are better at other things.
The iPhone and Android aren't competing with one another. They're mobile OSes that focus on doing very different things, aimed at different markets. Google gets that. I don't know if the phone manufacturers licensing Android get it, because they keep trying to compare themselves to the iPhone. They shouldn't; they have a solid product that happens to target a different market. So what's neat is that you can get the phone you want and I can get the phone I want, and we can both go away thinking we've got the better phone, and both of us are right.
I'd love to support WebOS, but it's still incredibly young, and I'd hate to switch to a platform that ends up dead-ended.
And, really, if you want an unlocked phone with a a comparable feature set, you need to be prepared to pay through the nose just to get a handset that doesn't do anything. And then pay again to get service for it.
You aren't trying to write free software for it.
I understand you like free software. You've spent two years reminding people here about how much you love free software; loving free software is awesome and it promotes a lot of good feelings in the programming world. But you have this tendency to jump into arguments and start parading your views no matter how logical the other side seems. I mean, we know the App Store is fucked up, and we complain about it, and we know that to you, the iPhone's being closed is a complete no-no. But you refuse to even admit that the other side has a logical point. This is something like the fifth time this week where you disagree with somebody not by refuting their points, but by implying that the person you're arguing with hasn't got a clue what they're talking about.
Having a contrary viewpoint is awesome. Disagreeing with other people's philosophies is awesome. Getting into protruded debate is awesome. But your occasional tactic of debating with somebody by ignoring everything they're saying and assuming they're ignoramuses is pointless and irritating. Stop.
