[christophocles]

All that really matters to me is the hardware. They can cripple the software all they want; we will (most likely) be able to flash the phone to WM6.5 and then WM7 and uncripple the software to use all of the features included in the hardware. This includes the FM radio, GSM/EDGE radio, VGA video recording etc etc. I think this will be a killer phone and the talented hacker community will be all over it. However if they go removing hardware features like the audio jack and the camera flash, then we're not so lucky. Battery covers can be replaced, but it looks like Sprint will do a lot more damage than just that.. They can't be as bad as VZW, though..