[Droid Incredible Android Development] acslam:
I dunno if it's insane so much as it is a small minority of people realizing what it's gonna take to motivate those with the skill to solve the issue. Realistically, I'd bet thousands of people have an incredible in their pockets and don't even know it can do TV out, and will never try even if you told them. Verizon certainly doesn't make much noise about the feature!

And even those of us that are savvy enough to know, might never use it enough to care. How many of us are running CM6.1 right now without feeling any loss of function? Dare I say, enough people that the entire process of making CM run on an incredible went through to the point of being called "stable" without even a hint of that feature being available. I know Im running it....even though I want TV out real bad.

Theres so little steam for this, that unless we can literally "fund" the R&D to make it happen ourselves, it might just disappear as newer phones come out and development stops on the older ones. I remember in april last year being amazed that I had a phone that ran @ 1GHz. I mean, seriously. One F@#$^$& gigahertz. And now, we're *****ing about the thunderbolt because it doesn't have dual cores in it! I can't recall a single year in phones where these kinds of leaps and bounds have been so constant.

The whole world of software is a strange parallel to the music industry, wherein it used to be a giant divide between "local band" and "warner bros gold record". Then we had the internet, and an entire underground revolution took place where artists on the ground level could again get their music to the masses, and since most of the middlemen were removed, it again became possible for the idea of a "modest" living on music to be made. The 10 bucks that someone pays for a vynal is going mostly to the artist, where the 25 you'd spend on a major CD might reach the artist as only 2 dollars. The artist wins, the listeners win, and the same kids who were "sticking it to the man" by downloading major releases turn around and trumpet the virtues of "support your favorite bands!!"

This whole world of phone tweaking is almost like that - for years we were lucky if a company made an app for something, and if they didn't, well, a lot of times it didn't get made. Sure, some people developed for WM, but based strictly on popularity of the platform, I couldn't do half of what I can with my android, even though there isn't a huge difference in hardware. It was also much more difficult to find the guys who made these programs - some of them were made in the 90's and just stayed part of the WM continuum for years after they should have been replaced.

Now we have a whole community based on this android os, and it feels like a lot of the middleman has been cut out of the equation - the "audience" can directly reach the "artist", and through that direct connection, can much more easily justify paying for the efforts made. It's hard to pay 60 bucks for a windows mobile app for GPS, for example, knowing that the developer at the end will see only a few cents of that. But when the price on the google market is only 5 bucks for an app, and you know a large percentage of that is going directly to the guy who put in his time and effort to make the program, it's much easier to swallow that.

When someone writes a program, Torque is a great example, that helps me, I'm willing to give the DEV some funding for it, just like I'm willing to pay for tickets to see a local show.

It's a sort of "golden age of software" that I think many have been waiting for, almost as if we get the virtues of "mom and pop shop" service, with the Walmart pricing we've come to depend on as a society.

Hell, I paid 15 bucks for the cable to make TV out function. After what I've paid for accessories for this phone, and considering I intend to keep it till t breaks, I'm certainly willing to contribute to the guy who finally gets the TV out running like it should. If I was a capable software dev, I'd do it myself. But, I'm not. I am however a mechanic, computer systems admin, musician, live sound engineer, and multitude of other things. And when someone asks for me to solve an issue in one of those areas, well, it's certainly nice to make a little scratch on it!

Sorry about the long rant, I'm drunk. And feverishly hoping someone makes this happen! Last trip I took was 12k miles of driving with no real map, in an overheating van, forgot the CD book at home, with a bunch of guys in the back begging for internet access, and we never ever had a hotel lined up before arriving at a destination. And my phone helped solve 100% of these problems, over and over again. Now if only I could get street fighter on the hotel TV from my phone (and hand a wii controller to my opponent), I could die a happy man!