Steve Jobs: "Want freedom? Buy Android"

According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs people who want porn or political satire should choose an Android phone instead of an iPhone. Because Apple has a "moral responsibility". You know, just like those Iranian priests have a "moral responsibility" to ban anything they find morally offensive (which is basically everything). In addition Jobs bans applications that are too similar to functionality already found in the iPhone, or applications that could perhaps in some way maybe be used to perform copyright infringement. Or applications he just doesn't like.

So I couldn't agree more with Jobs, if you want freedom on your phone instead of a "moral police" filtering out applications that they deem "inappropriate" for whatever reason, go buy an Android phone. I did.

Photo: barockschloss

Why exactly should I buy this crap?

I read a comparison of various cell phones in today's DN, and not surprisingly the hysterically over-hyped Iphone 3GS won the competition, together with the far superior, yet cheaper, Samsung Omnia HD.

Let's have a look at Iphone 3GS's selling points, according to the article:

• It can send and receive MMS.
• It's got bluetooth.
• It's fitted with a 3 megapixel camera, without flash.
• It's got a compass.
• You can copy and paste text from for example an e-mail.
• It's got support for the Swedish special characters ÅÄÖ (although the keyboard is "still hard to use").

All these new "features" are really the bare minimum you would expect from even the cheapest cell phone sold in the last 2-3 years, possibly with the exception of a compass. On the other hand, when have you ever been in a situation where you thought "damn, I really wish my phone had a compass"?

Why on earth should I literally pay through my nose for yesterday's news, when I could get a state of the art phone for almost half the price, and at the same time avoid the infamous Apple lock-in effect and the AppStore censorship madness?

Bad apples, part 2

As I've said before, I'm not (to say the least) a huge fan of Apple and their over-priced range of proprietary technology gadgets with a lock-in effect that should make Microsoft cry their eyes out. Today's example is just another one of why I would never dream of buying anything with the stupid apple logo on it: Being the control freaks they are, they have banned an actually useful utility, one of the very few I've ever heard of, from the AppStore (you know, the online store that let's you download applications that enable you to tickle your stupid iPhone, pop virtual bubble wrap and mimic the sound of a light sabre...), a remote control for a BitTorrent client, with the motivation that "this kind of software is often use to perform copyright infringements". Say what???

The BitTorrent technology is not only perfectly legal, it's a brilliant way of distributing all kinds of files. Furthermore, this remote control app doesn't actually download one single byte of "potentially illegal" material, it merely controls a BitTorrent client you've set up at home.

So, Apple, I'm assuming computers in general should be banned then, because they're "often used to perform copyright infringements". Particularily the DVD-burner, that's got to be banned. Burn it, I say! Oh, and the Internet, of course, we all know that a huge amount of the traffic on the Internet, both HTTP, FTP and not to mention those dreaded newsgroups, is piracy, so let's just close down the whole thing, shall we*?


*) Incidentally this is just what French president and crazy frog extraordinaire, Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to accomplish. Perhaps they should join forces, dumb bastards.