Extreme-customizeable phone w/ APIs or open source?

[aspenbordr]

I was thinking the other day...

What if a phone manufacturer, Sanyo, Samsung, etc., would give full developer access to the internal phone software? If they would publish APIs that would give anyone with some programming experience the chance to customize their phone to a much higher degree than simply changing some settings? You want more ringer volume levels? Change your software. It would lead to some really cool phones, with far more features than any currently have. Even for people that don't program, this would allow them to find various versions of software written by other people that they could easily put on their phones.

I often wish this were possible. It seems like every day I want something that would be easy to implement, but isn't there. The first thing that comes to mind (and let me know if this is already possible some way) is ringer scheduling. For instance, I could set my phone to automatically be on vibrate M-F, from 8:00am to 5:00pm. After that, when I am no longer in class, I could schedule the ringer to be on high volume. Starting at midnight, I could schedule the ringer to be on silent. And so on... It would help those that may forget to turn it off at work, and create fewer interruptions.

Any thoughts?

[PumiceT]

Awesome idea(s). Not sure if it would be a huge pain for them to make the phone run an OS, vs. running a set program. It might slow it all down so much, that it won't function as quickly as we'd like in a phone.

[aspenbordr]

Awesome idea(s). Not sure if it would be a huge pain for them to make the phone run an OS, vs. running a set program. It might slow it all down so much, that it won't function as quickly as we'd like in a phone.

Well, what it currently runs IS an operating system (don't want to confuse Open Source with Operating System). An operating system is basically just software that communicates w/ hardware. At some point, somebody wrote code for that operating system. I can't imagine its HORRIBLY complex, (its not exactly windows), so just playing with it would be cool. As for speed, if you write an extension that makes it slow, well, you need to either optimize or not use it.

Finally, the manufacturer should make some sort of "hard reset" so that no matter what you do to the phone, you can just hold down some keys for 10 seconds and restore.

Doesn't seem too hard to me....and I'd buy it in a second (and I'm not even THAT good of a programmer :-) )

AJ

[Halo2Proz]

I doubt it...probably the closest we could get would be with the MIDP 2.0 specs