[Chris Taylor @ Oct 1st 2006 5:20PM]

FOTA is BAD BAD BAD !!! People should whenever possible refuse to buy a phone that has FOTA without an option to COMPLETELY disable it with NO CHANCE of a forced update.

I am less worried about people phones being bricked by an erroneous update than I am with the provider deciding to "change" the features of my phone after the fact like verizon did with the 710 and like I believe sprint did with some phones to disable to ability to download untrusted material (like our own ringers and pictures)

They do not and should not have this right - the hardware belongs to me and I bought it with the feature set it had when I bought it. they should not be allowed to change the terms AFTER the fact unless they want to buy my phone for full retail price WHEN NEW AND with my permission only.

This is no different than say FORD coming into your garage late at night 15 years after you bought your car and "tweaking" the engine to limit you to say 55mph because they don't think you should be able to go faster.

Or microsoft coming into your house and tweaking your computer late at night so it will no longer run 98 or XP or Linux to FORCE you to go out and buy Vista.

We would NEVER accept those situations so we should also not accept MANDATORY FOTA. Optional FINE. but the moment they make it mandatory its WRONG.

and ANY update that is requires to maintain functionality should be legaly forced to be SEPERATE from "function change" updates that otherwise do not affect the ability of the phone to use the service.

[teodoro @ Oct 1st 2006 6:55PM]

The difference is that this is a service based hardware. Leasing computers would be a more accurate analogy.