This doesn't look like it feels too good: people getting punched in the face in ultra-slow motion. Yeowch. I guess in slow motion that would be yyyeeeeooowwwwwwwwcccchhhhhhh!

Stuart Ramson/HTC-AP

... this phone was not primarily designed to solve a problem that you, the consumer, are having. Rather it was designed to solve a problem that Google has—namely, the need to keep feeding more and more people into the maw of Google's online advertising machine ...

In other words, the phone is a Trojan horse. You get a cool phone for not much money—$179 with a contract from T-Mobile—but then you're caught in Google's Web. Another way to see this is that a quasi-monopolist (Google rules the online advertising business) is attempting to protect and extend its quasi-monopoly by giving away at no cost something for which others charge money. Sound familiar? It's what Microsoft did to Netscape in the 1990s, giving away a free browser to undermine Netscape Navigator.

Oh, snap! I haven't played with the device yet, but it does look fairly nifty (for an elaborate advertising platform, especially). Indeed, elsewhere on the Internets BoingBoing guest contributor Douglas Rushkoff seems to be enjoying his new toy:

I played with Android yesterday. I don't gush over products. At least not in years. But this one makes me feel a bit like I did when I got my Kaypro. It's a solid device that hints at the beginning of a "golden age" of solid and reliable smart phone technology ...

I've played with a lot of phones, but this is the first true "smart phone" that is as easy to use as an iPhone, Sidekick, or Helio Ocean. Unlike the iPhone, it has a real keyboard that slips out from the bottom (and a bit more effortlessly than the one on my Ocean). Real keys, too, that feel good and click. Oh, did I forget to mention it? Copy and paste.

Of course, Rushkoff flicks at the advertising concern, but in the end is just pleased as punch with his relatively open source toy. Here's a video demo of Android that's been making the rounds for, oh, a year (we're nothing if not timely).




In conclusion: I wish Newsweek's top editors would make big announcements wearing Rollerblades.

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”