A very common problem one has if one has enough files stacked up in one place, is whether or not those files have been copied to another system already. Have they already been copied off? To where on the other system were they copied? Sure, you can deduplicate them through various means but that tends to be kind of a sledgehammer thing to do, especially when one of the things with files is a mobile device. You could always upload the files to a provider's cloud¹ storage, like Google Drive or iCloud or something.

But what if you don't …

I've been using Android phones for probably ten years now. Not because I have any particular loyalty to Google or the platform, but just because I can afford the phones. The last time I tried to text on a candybar phone using T9 I about went out of my mind because it was so different from what I'd been using for years. Additionally, my fingertips are just too damned big to use that form factor of keypad reliably anymore. I don't have any particular beef against Apple and the iDoohickey product lines, I just can't particularly afford them. I can …

The other day I'd gotten sufficiently comfortable with my cellphone (an HTC Hero) to take the next step and root it (which is to say, I used the z4root exploit to get admin privileges). I mentioned it in passing to Lyssa last night and she made an observation that caught me off guard: "If you had to jailbreak your phone," she said, "how can you call Android 'open'?"

How indeed.

Let's set up an example. The Android OS is based on the open source Linux kernel as well as a suite of applications and systemware different from those of your …

A couple of weeks ago my old Treo started acting too wonky for comfort (such as refusing to hold a charge for any reasonable length of time) so I started hunting for a replacement. Interestingly, Sprint (my cell carrier) started offering a number of smartphones running the Android OS from Google back in October. I waited as long as I could while keeping an eye on the newswires to see what the going opinion of it was (as well as camped out at my local Sprint store for a while to play with all of their demo Android phones) and …