| >Getting your phone to work as a modem is not a problem that most people have. I'm just going to address this point right here. Almost all normal people I know would really appreciate being able to get internet in any variety of locales where they'd otherwise have to wrangle with stupid WiFi login screens and money portals or where even crappy commercial WiFi is unavailable (park?). The thing is that most people just don't even consider that it is or should be possible. If the "normal person" is incidentally using Ubuntu and Cyanogenmod, all we have to do is plug the phone in via USB, turn on tethering on the phone, click "HTC Android Phone" on "the two computers on the screen" (nm-applet), and that's that. This is extremely handy in a lot of cases. Today, for instance, I tethered my phone and used it to browse for a few hours because Comcast was choking to death on my new modem and I had to wait for a "backend engineer" to process the ticket the customer service people created. Do you think that having a redundant net connection with just your phone and a USB cord is valuable, even to "normal people"? I sure do. As to the rest of your post, you can generalize anything you want into a niche. I could say, "You know, 'normal people' only use their computers for Facebook, they definitely aren't trying to plug them into projectors". The reality is that plugging in a projector should work on Ubuntu and often does. As you noted, Windows is not perfect in this regard either; Ubuntu works excellently for a large number of people. Is that OK with you? Saying that Ubuntu can never take off because you have to manually specify projector output is quite far-fetched. Should I say that Windows will never take off because you usually have to install software to use your peripherals when on Linux they are almost always supported immediately upon plug in? Here's the real answer: desktop Linux will come around when it gets a company like Apple behind it, just as embedded Linux came around as TiVO, Google, Boxee, etc., put their weight behind it. Microsoft sells relatively few copies of Windows directly to consumers; almost all consumers receive Windows pre-installed on the computer that they purchased at major retailer X. The manufacturers integrate the OS and the hardware, ship it out, and sell the whole thing as a single product called a "PC". When Linux gets someone that does this on a major, Dell-like scale, we'll see Linux on the desktop. It's well past good enough; really, these things don't take all that much. The biggest obstacles are social: "Why doesn't this greeting card creation program I just bought for $60 work on my 'UBUNTOX'?" |
I thought you meant using your cell phone to place an outgoing call to a dialup internet service.
Note: I don't have an AT&T iPhone where I understand this doesn't work and yes, if you don't like iTunes it's probably going to be a PITA to get this to work.