Planned cell phone obsolescence?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Date: December 22, 2009 11:00:43 AM EST
To: dave () farber net, "Ip ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Planned cell phone obsolescence?

Everyone:

For years, I've carried a Kyocera/Qualcomm 6035 cell phone/PDA. It's dated now, but was one of the first really good 
PDA cell phones; my wife bought one and enjoyed it so much that I purchased one shortly thereafter. It's a standard 
CDMA/analog phone with plenty of output power, and can sometimes reach a cell site when newer CDMA phones or GSM phones 
cannot. What's more, it runs PalmOS, and when I bought my phone I also acquired some development tools and built 
personal applications that would be hard to replicate on newer models. I also purchased several "dead" phones of the 
same model on eBay, so that when we cracked the plastic case, bent a screen, or bent an antenna double, we'd have 
plenty of spare parts.

Unfortunately, within the past month our phones simultaneously began to misbehave in strange ways. The most annoying of 
these is that they turn off spontaneously -- especially when roaming (when I most need my phone to be on). The chances 
of this happening at random to two different phones, purchased about a year apart, are minuscule, so something's up. Is 
there something in the phone's firmware that causes the phones to malfunction after a certain date? Are cellular 
carriers turning it off, perhaps because it doesn't have GPS capability (something that I prefer for privacy)? Does 
anyone else on the list have a similar phone that's malfunctioning or have insight into this problem?

--Brett Glass





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