I can see Apple saying, “Well, you see, the record companies would have been upset with us if we hadn’t charged anything for ringtones.” Yah, well, that’s the price you get for engaging. The price for owning the distribution of the content and the hardware and the software is that you end up making compromises in the hardware and software in order to protect the content.

These are EXACTLY the compromises Sony has been making for years — and because Sony’s music and movie arms have been telling the Sony hardware arm to never do anything new or interesting without building in a ton of customer-unfriendly restrictions, Sony is now completely in the toilet. They have gone from an incredibly respected brand to a complete joke. Every time they introduce some new, crippled standard the industry kind of looks away in embarrassment, like Sony is the oafish guy at the party who is parked in front of the meatballs tray eating directly from the dish.

The rumour flew around that something new was in the works combining all the power of Daddy and all the elegance of Mummy. We couldn’t wait. This will be the Big One, we thought, the justification and apotheosis of UIQ.

Mine arrived at the beginning of this week. What a crushing, lowering, fury-inducing disappointment. Just how dumb are the software engineers, designers and marketeers at Sony E? Believe me, I so wanted this to be good. Instead, it is nothing more than a gesture, an under-considered, badly implemented nod at the market.

It’s an M600i running Symbian v 9.1 and UIQ v 3.0 equipped with a camera and WiFi.. That’s it. No attempt has been made to alter the UI or the OS. The result: the clumsiest, most asinine method of internet connection ever devised (yes it has a wizard to download your network’s APN etc., but that’s not enough) comes unaltered, the bugginess and the slowness too have all have been inherited, and the short battery life.

Did they really think slinging on a 3.2MP camera and WiFi would make a desirable device, let alone an iPhone killer? I could issue forth quires of intemperate fury on the subject of how bad internet account configuration is on the UIQ Sony Ericssons. It’s utterly pointless.

Is there not one person at either Sony E or Symbian who themselves uses the phone and says “hang on, we could do this better”? That’s all it takes. Just one person to point at the Emperor and shout “nudie!” That’s why Apple is Apple, they have people there (and of course it comes from the top) who say - “woah, not good enough, not cool enough, not simple enough, not fun enough, not sexy enough, not clever enough, not useful enough”.

The P1i is what happens when “oh, that’ll do” becomes the corporate motto.

As for the notion expressed by some commenters that kids could never figure this thing [OLPC] out, and would never be able to figure out how to code software… um? What world do you live in? The one where young people are the last to figure out a new technology? The one in which grandpa has to show little Bobby how to program the VCR? The one in which only grownups are texting each other on their cell phones and building Facebook apps? Children love computers, in no small part because they love learning.

Java has a compiler. Ruby does not. That's great! Fuck compilers and their false sense of security. Too often is bad code checked in or even deployed to production, simply because it compiled. No such luxury in the Ruby world.