Mobile phone networks where designed to get users to use as many minutes as possible since the business model of cell phone companies is charging per minute. You can see the impact of this on the way that people use their phones. People think constantly about how many minutes they have left, whether they are using nighttime or daytime minutes, etc. etc. Also, the types of services that are offered on cell phones are all services that fit into this business model.

The mobile phone networks were built to fulfill a social demand, rather than to create a market. But this media was created almost entirely by private companies whose business model was selling service by the minute. This created a medium that encourages users to be using it as much as possible no matter what they are doing. “Thus, it might be argued that the emerging industrial society of the 19th century invented the telephone to meet its communications needs. This thesis will argue in Chapter 6 that the mobile telephone was developed in the 1990s largely in response to this type of widespread social need, not random technological breakthroughs.” (Anthony Townsend’s Thesis) When the telecoms have driven the technology, the result has been quite different. WAP is an example of the mobile phone companies designing a technology to restrict users access: “WAP wanted to keep users as consumers, never producing. Always consuming.”
Clay Shirky

The bottom line is that mobile phones are little computers, complete with screens and keyboards. Yes, even a 7 year old phone without Symbian or a color screen. Basically all current mobile phones are faster than the Apple II, which was a triumph in getting interactive computers to the masses. What makes mobile phones so different from the Apple II is that the companies who sell them actively try to prevent people from hacking on their own devices. What made the Apple II such a massive success was that Apple encouraged people to develop and share code for it, true to the ethic of the Homebrew_Computer_Club that it was a product of. So when you get down to it, mobiles phones are a platform where there are strong forces trying to keep you dumb and to make sure that you only ever have read-only literacy in the device. Yes, even the glorius iPhone is very much a full-fledged member of the club that wants to keep you from creating on your own software. You not only have to pay Apple $99 for the privelege of putting software on your own device, but most people who apply to be iPhone developers have been rejected.

This draconian lock down on Apple’s part might be the inspiration for people to start hacking their own phones. It wasn’t so long ago that the DMCA made that illegal. Thankfully, there is some intelligence at the Library of Congress and they have since made it legal for people to install software on their own devices.

I recently ran the iPhoneDevCampNYC with others and through this process, I have come to a realization. Apple has created a very nice piece of hardware that many people want. But since they have restricted its use and availability, there is now a massive demand for hacking the iPhone. Thanks to the work of the iphone dev team and others, it is quite easy to circumvent Apple’s restrictions. 250,000 iPhones never had their AT&T service activated, that means almost 20% of iPhone buyers have been hacked to be unlocked.

One people realize that they can control their own devices, I think it will be quite hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Just like how the demise of Napster actually made peer-to-peer software stronger and more popular, Apple’s restrictions could end up creating a stronger and more organized hacker community. The delayed release of the iPhone SDK already created a large community around the unofficial SDK, now we need to work to keep that community alive, and continue to be the center of innovation for the iPhone.

Then as more open projects like OpenMoko and perhaps Google Android come along, that should further the pressure on mobile manufacturers in general to open up the devices.