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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

Apple invented none of that. My first smartphone, the Treo 300 (released in 2003) had no carrier garbage, was a much more open platform than iOS, and at least on Sprint came with an unlimited data plan.

Those features were unusual in the dumb-phone dominated industry at that time, but were omnipresent when it came to smartphones.

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Didn't the 300 from sprint come with a bunch of crap apps (i.e. NFL mobile or whatever) installed on it?

I also had a Treo 300 (and a 180, a 600, and 750p)--so I maybe be confusing this with one of the later ones. The apps were easy enough to delete, IIRC, but there were some on there. And, as all crap apps, they were completely useless.

That said, sprint did offer unlimited data (and text) for far less than AT&T. I'm still bitter about that.

In America the carriers controlled the market and the device manufacturers where beholden to them. In Europe it was the other way around.

This is slightly off-topic, but I remember reading about a European initiative for a standard mobile charger a while back. Did that actually happen?

USB micro?

Yes and no. There is a standard (microUSB) but they don't have to adopt it. The devices makers just have to make sure there is an adaptor to microUSB for their device is available (they don't even have to ship it with their device, just has to have one in the market somewhere). So much for standards I guess.

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