No, it's a crucial one, for a simple reason: you're not supposed to change the firmware of your car, but you change the software in your palmtop computer quite often. Car firmware is special purpose (let's ignore some high-end multimedia stuff), while your palmtop computer can and does run any program.
Nothing technically prevents you from tethering a keyboard, mouse, and big screen to your palmtop computer —just like you do with some laptops when you dock them. Heck, it would be damn useful, to centralise all your computing in the palm of your hand.
The fact that your computer fits in the palm of your hand and can hook up to a phone network is not a good reason to have its usage restricted. The only reason people got tricked into thinking this is somehow okay, is because those computers are misnamed "smartphones".
No. They're networked computers. "Phone" is a distant second by now.
If the Java compiler doesn't run on android phones then it's only because no-one actually cares enough to make it do so. There's no reason you couldn't run a full IDE on an android device with a keyboard, mouse and big screen tethered to it and use it to work on programs for that device (including updates to the IDE itself), except that it would be dumb; nothing technically prevents you from doing that.
And why would that be dumb? Because my phone doesn't have the CPU power?
Granted, doing this set us back a few years. Still, for my day to day computing (everything except 3D gaming and maybe HD movies), I would totally love to have my phone run GNU/Linux with my favourite window manager when tethered, and an Android-like touch-based shell when unplugged.
No, it's a crucial one, for a simple reason: you're not supposed to change the firmware of your car, but you change the software in your palmtop computer quite often. Car firmware is special purpose (let's ignore some high-end multimedia stuff), while your palmtop computer can and does run any program.
Nothing technically prevents you from tethering a keyboard, mouse, and big screen to your palmtop computer —just like you do with some laptops when you dock them. Heck, it would be damn useful, to centralise all your computing in the palm of your hand.
The fact that your computer fits in the palm of your hand and can hook up to a phone network is not a good reason to have its usage restricted. The only reason people got tricked into thinking this is somehow okay, is because those computers are misnamed "smartphones".
No. They're networked computers. "Phone" is a distant second by now.