Companies including RIM, Nokia, Microsoft and Apple should watch out for Android with its Linux roots. Development appears to be fast. At this speed their lunch is at risk.

What appears to be holding Adroid is "bad" publicity on battery life, the poor organization of the Android Market including poor quality apps and the [subjective] poor user experience on high end phones.

As a matter of fact, the state of the Android Market is severely anaemic because whereas apps in this market are said to number about 75,000 now, having a look over here [android.com] does not show any figure near that!

To make matters worse, there is no provision for searching for an app whose name you might not remember well. What surprises me is that the market is owned by a company (Google) which boasts of the greatest and best search engine in planet earth! Think about that for a moment.

Now before I get flamed, I know there is AndroLib. [androlib.com] What I am talking about are efforts by the search giant Google.

That brings up a good question I've always wondered, which is "how far do you push the "Open" part of FOSS"? I mean to hear RMS tell it anything short of GNUSense isn't really "free" because they allow binary blobs and firmware, but at the same time if a company says "take it or leave it" how many times can you say "leave it" before you don't have enough devices to worry about? I mean Nvidia will give you nothing but a binary blob, yet here on /. we hear guys say time and time again to stick to Nvidia even though ATI has opened their specs, so at what point does the Linux community decide features or performance is worth more than freedom?

As for TFA, unless the telecos change their business models I doubt you'll be getting much "free" in a handheld, as crippling phones and locking the hell out of their networks is pretty much SOP, and I just don't see that changing. After all if your phone was truly "free" you could have hackers finding a way to allow tethering, or turning on the features the telecos killed, and they certainly wouldn't like that. With something like PMPs I can see having freedom because other than Apple's walled garden of iTunes most manufacturers don't care what you do with the device once they have your money, as long as they don't have to support your hacks. But the telecos want to keep getting your money by forcing you to buy "premium features" which are often already on the phone and simply turned off. And I really don't see them giving up that golden goose for users freedom any time soon. So really, what good would having the GPU open really be if the rest of the device is locked tighter than a nun's thighs?

The driver stack for the FOSS side is just now beginning to learn how to crawl properly- something you need to do before you can walk or run.

Previously, we'd reverse engineered the stuff. Based on what I've learned doing work for one of the Big Two (that'd be AMD or NVidia...), they're barking up the right tree, doing things in the large the same way they do things within the driver. When the community gets to those first few stumbling steps instead of crawling around, the speed of development will increase- and AMD's stuff will suddenly become quite valuable to anyone on Linux or other FOSS OS.

Like we've been told before in the past- doing 3D drivers isn't exactly an easy thing to do. It takes some time before you can get to the same level of support we see with the proprietary drivers from NVidia and AMD. Unfortunately, you either have to choose pretty robust drivers, slightly less robust/speedy hardware, coupled with closed drivers- or choose much more unstable drivers (some people have GREAT results with AMD's stuff, I've got decent results with some issues in my case- but some have pure HELL with the drivers in question...) and the promise of 6-12 months down the line having 60% of the peak performance with an open source driver, coupled with the promise of seeing as much as 85% of the peak performance or more in another 12-24.

Many will choose the shiny solution that works right now. Some don't need and can't afford to fidget with the hardware to make it work and will buy something for business that will work right now (AMD's stuff is less robust in the laptop space until recently- which translated into an NVidia purchase on my i7 laptop I'd bought a while back.

If AMD's closed source solution was a full-on winner (it's not...) there'd be a lot less people buying NVidia right now because they opened up and it's coming together for everyone on that space, albeit slowly.