So this story is a couple of days old but I do not think that that many people picked it up. Software security expert Matt Hamrick got so fed up with the quality of standard issue mobile phones and tinkering with them and spending money on them ($3,000 over the past two years trying to get his calendar and e-mail to sync between his Apple computer and his phone) that he founded the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club. The Build-A-Bear like club for cell phones attracted more than 40 people to its first meeting.
Like the Hombrew Computer Club of the 1970’s, the Mobile Phone club hopes that its organization will pave the way for something akin to the personal computer revolution sparked by its predecessor.
The group has a bit of an advantage in that when the Computer Club was started not every member had a computer… every member of this club already has a mobile phone… in fact that is why the group was founded.
Some of the things Hamrick wants are the ability to be able to access more than just one of his many different e-mail accounts at once, a stopwatch that doesn’t stop when the phone goes into power-save mode. I like the one where he wants voicemail’s delivered and saved directly on the phone. He also aches, like most of us, for a broader choice of messaging systems than the prehistoric and mobily sloppy AOL Instant Messenger.
What Hamrick and many others are feeling and realizing is the lock-downed attitude that makes up the mobile industries. Between the carriers and the phone manufacturers the mobile roads are either closed or heavily tolled and always monitored by those who build and maintain them.
This has led to an influx of people proposing everything from Open Phone Systems [great article], to creating organizations like the Silcon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club or just going out and like Surj Patel and Deva Seetharam did and build their own [great article] cell phone and blog about it. I have been following that one for a while now. Riveting. Casey Halverson, a Seattle-based mobile developer is doing the same thing at his blog. There is even a guy who mobilized a Rotary Phone [also here]!
Now, these groups and individuals do not yet pose a threat to carriers and phone manufacturers and we are probably a long way’s a way from this type of difficult tinkering from ever becoming mainstream. One of the above articles quoted a Cingular spokesperson reminding us that any cell phone radio has to be approved by the Federal Communications Commission and the carrier itself before using the network, but said that the company supported experimentation.
In short, the carriers and the phone manufacturers would be silly to fight and gave these open source phone tinkerers a hard time. If anything at all, it can show them what people want in their phones that they are not providing as well as give them a stern warning. If you wont do it, somebody, somewhere, somehow, eventually will. And the will do it for almost nothing, on the cheap in their grandmothers garage. And people like garage coming of age stories.
[via Wired]
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