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Comment by Sidnicious | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to get one of these and play with it. Will the SDK and spec for talking to it be freely available after the initial batch of preorders and free dev kits?

As a counterexample, Emoviv gave a TED talk a while ago showing off a headset that lets you control your computer with your mind. When you visit their website you discover that you can only develop with a $500 “developer edition” headset that comes with a single, nontransferrable license to use the SDK (additional licenses are $99). The consumer model of the headset only runs approved applications.

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Dev Kits ship for free to 20,000 developers in 1-3 months.

Pre-orders are for consumers at $70 and ship this winter.

The idea is to give all the hackers maximum access to create awesome apps and then deliver a healthy shiny ecosystem to the consumer. Also, we'd like to see a larger shift towards people creating things, so encouraging early adopters to get aboard the coding train is a positive trend.

It's a huge new interaction space, and we're looking for innovators to explore it!

That’s awesome. Are there any differences between the consumer model and the dev kit, other than the price (and will people who bought the consumer model be able to develop with it later)?

Other people have asked about openness… will there be any kind of control over what programs can use it (i.e. do they need to be approved by you guys to work?)

So this will run approved software only as well?

Well, that's a big turnoff for a dev. Why instead of maximizing the short term profit you concentrate on the long-term and make this system open with certain limitations to assure your business?

Contrast with Android where every device is a developer device - one tickbox in the settings is all that is required. No accounts, registration, handing over money, authorizing devices etc (yes I'm looking at you Apple).

Every Andriod device, even the ones locked down by the carriers? I find that statement suspect.

Yes, even the ones AT&T locked. Look in settings for a developer/development submenu on any device.

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