[T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide] cj chitwood:
@BlackKnightAvalon: Fully agreed.

If I may go further OT for a moment here, this nonsense about hermetically sealing the phones together reminded me of shopping for the G1.

See, back then, I made a list of things I required in a phone. It was to be my first phone, one I would pay for myself (instead of using someone else's old hand-me-down they no longer were using). My now wife at the time had the old Sidekick LX, which while not a smartphone by today's standards opened my eyes to a realm of possibilities beyond handheld computers like the Palm and iPaqs. I had a personal cheapie freebie Nokia bar phone, and my work phone was the top of the line version of the same form factor. Then work provided me with a flip about the same time my wife upgraded from her flip to a Sidekick. So at the time, I had her flip, and it was more than I needed. But the work flip, being a motorola, was hackable, by design. I was able to put my own sounds, ringtones, bootup sequence graphics, all that into it. So I knew what I wanted.

My list included a few things:

Be Linux based or at least open source so I could hack it to suit my tastes (I was thinking more along the lines of theming)

Be GSM so I can swap SIMs when I need to (if another phone borks, and I want to loan them mine without giving out *my* number to everyone...)

have a qwerty keyboard and not just a number pad (I hadn't considered the possibility of a touchscreen keyboard)

have a camera

have a standard USB charging port

have Internet capability (back then this wasn't on every phone you could buy)

have wifi

GPS was a plus, but not a requisite

Bluetooth was a plus

And a whole slew of other things, but basically, the G1 satisfied that list and more.

Because of iPhone and now HTC practices, I'm now forced to add a few things to that list, and I'm not sure my next phone won't be a Samsung. I really hate the bluish hue of the AMOLEDs, but it may be worth it. Depending on whether Google can bring Motorola out of crapzone I might consider a moto. Anyway, the new list will include all of the old one, plus:

Removable battery of at least 1800mAH rating

PHYSICAL keyboard -- my MT4GS just proved the need for that, though admittedly if the screen wasn't a slider the cable inside might not have failed

PHYSICAL Call Start/Stop buttons a definite plus, almost a requirement

REMOVABLE media

Headphone jack

TV Out, whether HDMI (MHL/microUSB) or composite (headphone jack)

For that matter, digital TV OTA receive and low-power transmit

FM Radio receive, preferably transmit

HD Screen

1.5GHz+ dual+ core

Doodooflinger capable

2-meter and 70-cm Amateur Radio band capable, a definite plus (should be not too difficult to do methinks and would help for those times when I'm out of signal in the mountains). The 33- and 23-cm amateur bands should be easy enough to come into, at the very least.

Satellite TV dish aiming

Dishwasher autoloader

... ?

EDIT: Add Police scanner and aircraft band receive...

Clearly, I have raised the bar by which I will judge handset manufacturers.

I'm not joking about that amateur radio bit. That's some serious geek creds waitin' to happen right there.

But yeah, back on-topic, I think I'm okay with HTC / T-Mo knowing I rooted the phone, as long as they don't start holding software choices against me in the realm of hardware failure. After all, I know the difference, and nothing I've done with the software had any bearing on their hardware breaking down before designed lifespan is up.

Here's something to be sure NOT to include:

Genius button

.com/www. button

duplicated buttons from the faceplate on the slideout keyboard

similar stupidity