By Yvette Wohn After much anticipation and fanfare, the Android made a wobbly debut. A security flaw was discovered just days after it was released and users discovered some fine print that gives Google more power than originally anticipated. Despite these problems, critics are still optimistic about the Android because it encourages generativity. Android is an […]

Readers of FOI may recall the introduction’s focus on the iPhone as the book’s first example of a tethered appliance.  The release of Android was viewed with some excitement as a challenge to Apple, in more ways than one. Google, and later the Open Handset Alliance, have touted Android as an open source alternative to […]

After praising the iPhone as wholesome as warm bread, Colbert takes to task the iPhone for its “kill switch” (“It actually kills you!”).  In the meantime, Gizmodo reports that there’s a “BossPrefs” app to disable it, joining the more labor intensive method of tricking the iPhone into thinking that the Apple update server is found […]

It’s been clear from the start that information appliances like the iPhone, tethered to their vendors, would have a kill switch — that’s just a subset of the vendor’s (in the case, Apple’s) ability to reprogram any aspect of the phone from a distance at any time.  In a world of third party apps, that […]

I don’t mean to only talk about the iPhone apps system — Facebook apps, Google mash-ups, and plenty of other emerging platforms share the fascinating if troubling characteristics of iPhone apps — but it’s an example that’s continuing to expand. On the one hand is the NYT’s reporting that the iPhone Apps Store has pressured […]

The iPhone has come some way since the days when Steve Jobs pledged that Apple would “define everything that is on the phone.”  Yet even with a software development kit allowing for outside coding, Apple reserves the right to … define everything that is on the phone.  Application makers submit their apps for Apple’s approval, […]

One of the more contestable claims of the FOI book is that tethered information appliances like the iPhone, that either block outside apps or subject them to much more gatekeeping by the platform vendor, will not only complement the more open PC, but overtake it — that PCs themselves will become appliancized. Already there’s talk […]

Macworld is reporting that some iPhone application developers are having a difficult time adjusting to having to distribute their software only through Apple.  They’re apparently too afraid to go on the record (!), but: As developers update their applications — including bug fixes — it can take up to a week for a new version […]

The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design project highlights objections to technologies that enforce limitations on the uses of the content they carry.  This weekend they’re encouraging people to book time with an Apple “genius” — one of the in-store sales + tech support people who usually spend the day answering questions about iPod capacities […]