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Verizon explains V710 Bluetooth crippling

In this article in eWeek, a Verizon Wireless spokesperson is quoted as saying

"The v710 includes Get It Now, our virtual mall of games and productivity tools that customers can download. The agreements we have with our content providers preclude our allowing anyone to download these applications beyond the phone. The open architecture of Bluetooth could also allow customers to download Get It Now applications beyond the phone,"

so to read between the lines - they are concerned about piracy of BREW games and ringtones. that's what this has all been about. keeping tight control over what is put on their handsets. the explanation is a legal one that the BREW developer contracts with CPs - but i am sure there is way more to it than that.

BREW, unlike J2ME, is compiled for the specific handset and processor - and although J2ME is hardly write-once-run-anywhere, BREW applications are even less so. The strict NSTL testing process can easily fail an application on a handset for slight differences in keypad configurations and such, more often for memory errors that occur with sloppy C programming.

It's pretty easy to crash a phone with a BREW program. I've done it myself many many times by doing things like writing to an array index that doesn't exist.

If applications were to be spread around to handsets via the internet and not over-the-air - this would create a customer service nightmare for Verizo. People would call with all sorts of problems and not admit they have pirated apps on their handset.

Keep in mind - getting an application on a BREW phone is a pretty difficult task to begin with. Currently, we developers have to send every handset we test on to Qualcomm to get the magic bit flipped that allows us to load applications on the phones via a cable.

and it seems that someone would have to write a custom BREW application to even send applications off the handset from bluetooth.

wouldn't a simpler soultion have been to request that Motorola not allow the Bluetooth application to have access to anything but the images folder?

i guess the bottom line is, don't expect to see many Bluetooth enabled handsets from Verizon that are totally open. The LG-VX8000 that comes out next week does not have bluetooth enabled, but it's successor the LG-VX8100 does, so it will be interesting to see what they do here.