Exactly. They may be 'clean ESN' units now, but when Verizon determines that there's 1 out of 5 'prototype' units unaccounted for, guess which one is going to be on the blacklist?

Only good this phone would be for is MetroPCS or Cricket... or any other carrier that doesn't care about bad ESN phones from other carriers.

Have fun, Samsung.

We'll see Bada in the trash by the second half of next year, if you haven't lobotomized it enough as you did with your latest Android phone with that cruddy TouchWIZ interface.

You have to buy it in bulk by directly contacting them. And by bulk, I mean, say, 5000 units at $80 or so each. So unless you have a half-million to play with, I doubt you'd be getting your hands on one soon.

Surprise! Bell doesn't offer anything less than a 3 year contract on the Pre. Not even off-contract.

Although I *did* pick up a Mogul back when they still had them for ~$130 US off-contract and shove it on Pageplus Prepaid... saves paying hundreds more for a new model of the same States-side. (The advantage of living next to Canada... cheap beer and cheap last-generation phones.)

When they crack Managed Copy encryption, I can't wait - it'll make piracy all the much more easier. Why bother with all the nasty ripping and re-encoding when you can just use the movie company's work as your own?

It is - it's just a software change. Looks like they just took their Classics and re-flashed and re-labeled them.

And to Mr. Sarva, what are you smoking? I got woken up twice in a single night by my *respectable* smartphone with crummy announcements that you were on Late Night on NBC and then the actual announcement of TwitterPeek.

... They're fucking over their users; a Verizon Wireless DayPass was $15/day for all-you-could eat data on their aircards. I did an experiment with it before: I had a $25 prepaid Visa that I used to pay for a DayPass then racked up about 8 GB of data in a day (yay BitTorrent) to see if they charge overages for it.

Needless to say they only held the $15 and not processed it, because two weeks after the fact I noticed my balance on the card was $25 once again.

*sigh* Sure, HTC's coming out with great phones and nice advertising, but their support *sucks*.

I've been out my G1 for over a week and a half while their half-brained RMA technicians 'diagnose' the fact my G1's touch screen is faulty.

So, if Apple's being heckled by Nokia for using Nokia's technology, when's Wacom going to come along and heckle Nokia for using Wacom's technology?

I noticed something in the video on how they are accomplishing this:

They're using EMC Mobility's AEVIT drive-by-wire system, normally built for the handicapped. You can just see it in the video with the joystick and wheel in the background at about 1:27. The screen right next to it controls all of the vehicle functions from the wipers to the gearbox. Also note the AEVIT badge on the side of the car at about 1:37.

http://www.emc-digi.com/ is their site showcasing the AEVIT system.

They're simply tapping into that via a few computers, and viola - instant iCar.

Systems like this are a lot easier to deal with instead of, say, tons of motors and actuators in the cabin. AEVIT enables them to, at a whim, disable the whole system and drive it normally without much clutter in the way.