T-Mobile/danger.com Sidekick

The device is all-the-packets-you-can-eat, so naturally you're not allowed to plug it into a laptop or anything. You can only use the apps built into the device. To solve my problems with the Sidekick,

• It should have ``official'' and ``unofficial'' applications. When using official apps, you get unlimited bandwidth. For unofficial apps, you have to pay for whatever bandwidth they consume. Probably the actual bill should be something between packets and bandwidth, since in the upstream direction it's really packet count rather than amount of data that costs the carrier spectrum. In the downstream, a good network can be closer to costing in bandwidth rather than packet count.
• Unofficial bandwidth should have a daily use cap. This is to stop buggy applications from going out of control and causing huge bandwidth spikes within your monthly billing period. For example, I once had a non-Sidekick phone-and-laptop plan where the US$/kByte rate would charge almost $1000 for downloading Mozilla. If you use up all your unofficial bandwidth, official apps keep working, but all your unofficial apps get shut off for the rest of the day. After 24 hours they start working again. The daily cap could be instead of, or in addition to, charging for unofficial traffic.
• It's okay that the apps and software in your Sidekick is controlled by the network. In fact, this is fantastic---I don't want my phone catching viruses or getting corrupted, and I don't want to be responsible for backing it up in case it gets lost, and if something goes wrong I'd rather fix it by using a touch-tone menu system or going to some Control Panel Web Page, rather than dragging out data cables and installing things on my PeeCee. It's hard to make PDAs a good overall experience. I think it's great that it acts as a pseudopod extension of the carrier's system. I don't want to reinstall or bug-patch or service the phone. I want them to help manage the device. However, this doesn't mean they have to lock me out of it and turn it into a mobile billboard and marketing channel. I should still have some control over the device.
• It's okay that packets are not allowed to leave the device, and you're not allowed to plug it into a laptop. I actually find it a pain in the ass to plug my laptop into my phone. I've done it, and it is too much like unloading the HumVee and setting up some kind of military communications tent. To me a keitai and a laptop are separate devices. There's room in my imagination for a wireless device that refuses to let you use it with a laptop.
• It is okay that the device doesn't have actual Internet access, and that all its communication with the outside world goes through a proxy. However the proxy server should be presented to the user as something between a web hosting company and a Unix shell account. I should have a webhost-style ``control panel'' for the proxy, and I should be able to write, compile, and run my own Java programs on the proxy server. Any programs I write are, of course, ``unofficial'' programs. And of course I won't be able to, say, install Linux on the Sidekick or anything---I can only run Java programs inside the sandbox they provide.
• One of the most important things about the Sidekick is, it's a PDA that's always-on. Other PDA's that target people like me, like the Zaurus, aren't as interesting to me because you have to put them into ``suspend'' while they're in your pocket to get reasonable battery life. If some battery-saving monkey business is required, I can live with that, but it ought to be running code that I write and communicating with the network 24/7 in order to be interesting to me.
• It is absolutely not okay that there's no ssh client. There should at least be a packet-billed unofficial ssh client. It's too important to people like me, for emergencies when people tell me something is ``down,'' or doing neat ad-hoc stuff, or just bragging to my friends. It's the first question I ask when someone shows me a networked PDA. It's the first question everyone around me asks, too. It's really not negotiable at all. And I don't care what danger.com has had internally for the last two or three years. Lots of people tell me danger has an ssh client working as if that means it's just around the corner for the rest of us, but since these rumors have been out for >2yrs, clearly Deutsche Telekom's business rules are the problem, not the existence of code.
• It is absolutely not okay that the carrier wants to take ownership of my copyrighted programs, and control where they're copied and who is allowed to use them. They want me to write programs, then they take the programs away from me, and sell them back to me. It's insulting and unacceptable for anyone but the most greedy and mediocre programmer.

Yeah, it's disappointing that I can't personally make use of their clever architecture because the necktie damage hits me in ways that are too important to me, personally, so you can say ``each Technology (product) has its strengths and weaknesses'' or something similarly equivocal. But it's also infuriating that gigantic telephone companies are so successfully using technical evolution, and ``the network effect'' meant in a marketing sense, to mediate our interpersonal communications, and further that they're able to effectively profit off the greater moderation power they've grabbed.