Well, other than paying for it when purchasing a Palm or a Treo, that is. That's why I was startled that Apple is going to charge users for an OS upgrade to the iPod Touch:

WWDC Apple will release version 2.0 of the iPhone operating system in early July, CEO Steve Jobs has revealed. Existing iPhone owners will get it for free - iPod Touch owners, however, will have to cough up $10.

iPhone 2.0 offers the ability to view and edit iWork documents - files from Apple's own Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps. More users, we suspect, will make use of the upcoming OS' ability to handle Office documents.

So, phone users get it for free, non-phone users have to pay? Of course, because Apple has total control over iPod market. AT&T would never agree to a pay upgrade for a phone, since they're billing those customers monthly.

The grass looks less and less green when it comes to switching to Apple.

Question from LinkedIn User:

What do you have to say about external NAS appliances for your home network?

I am looking to purchase a new NAS device for my home network. I would
prefer to have a RAID system that isn't dependent on one vendor for the
harddrives but if you feel strongly about a particular solution please
don't let that stop you from saying so. I expect the solution to have a
gigabit network card and would prefer RAID 1. 500 MB is fine but 1 TB
would be better.





My Answer:

I've set up the D-Link two-drive enclosure for a friend, but his main
need was to share music between a laptop, home desktop system, and one
for his kids. The D-Link product is $170-$200 with no drives, so you
could buy two 1TB SATA drives on your own. It's also sold with two
500GB drives for around $400. It's a far cry from the BlueArc NAS heads
I teach about for Hitachi Data Systems, but hey, it's a home unit!




The Data Robotics product is a bit more up-scale. Think of it as a
4-drive shelf where you can mix-and-match drives. You can start with a
single drive and scale up to all four as you go.




The big question would be, do you need a four-drive shelf? That's
4TB with no fault tolerance, or 2TB of RAID1, either way, that's a lot
of space for most home applications. Base investment in the Drobo
solution is $400 for the shelf, then $200 for the software, then $200
or so for each drive. No argument that Droboshare is much more robust
than other solutions, but the price tag is higher.

As much as I enjoyed the look and feel of my T-Mobile Dash, I couldn't take the fact that, because it was Winders Mobile, it re-booted itself several times a day. No surprise this statistic:

Smartphones running Linux look set to become far more commonplace within the next five years, market watcher ABI Research has forecast.

The firm's VP, Stuart Carlaw, reckons that Linux will feature on 23 per cent of smartphones by 2013. He added that that share of the market will put the open source operating system in second place in the smartphone popularity stakes, putting it behind Symbian and ahead of Microsoft's Windows Mobile worldwide.

Combine the move to Linux by companies like Nokia with Palm going to Linux for the next version of its OK and perhaps we'll see fewer WinMobile phones.